•Corrections

Yesssss, it seems I have some corrections and additions to make.

First, in the my original armour combos post (and on the Armor page), the fifth item in the male w/o meditation combo reads "studded gorget". It SHOULD read "studded gloves". My mistake. [10:50PM - And Redrum just caught it, too... never mind...]

Second, it seems that tinker traps are not quite as useless as I thought they were. To properly set one up for use, lock the chest using a bare key then put the key on a key ring. You should get a "this trap is armed" message. Next, use the key ring to unlock the chest. Notice you don't get a "trap is disarmed" message. Now, they don't work quite the way they used to. Pre-patch, once you had the trap in this state, ANY attempt to open the box would set off the trap (kaboom-or-hisss, deathcry). Under the new system, when it is in this state the person who locked/unlocked the box can get into it, but no one else can. If a thief is snooping through your backpack, he/she can click once on the chest to get the # of items/weight message, but they cannot double click and open the box. The same goes for a PK who kills you and loots the chest. They can't get into the trap chest unless they 1)use the Detect Hidden skill to expose the trap, then 2)use Remove Trap to get rid of the trap, then 3)use Lockpicking to open the box. If the trap is not removed, the moment they try to use Lockpicking on the chest the trap will go off, and will keep going off indefinitely.

While I preferred it when the trap went off the moment you tried to open the chest, you can't have everything. Basically, it means that anything you keep in a trap box is available for you to use and unstealable. Just lock/unlock the box and leave the key in your bank box. While testing this, I had a couple of thieves try to random steal - instant guard wack. A PK may loot your box, but he isn't getting inside it (know many people with GM Remove Trap? I sure as hell don't). Thanks to shanty for originally pointing this out to me, and to the hordes of Moonglow bank thieves on Baja (who helped me and didn't even know it).

•Minor change.

The armor section was changed just a tad. For the male character without meditation, it was stated that you should wear a plate gorget and a studded gorget. The studded gorget was changed to studded gloves. Sorry for the confusion.

• UO blues

Well in case you missed my post in the forum the imbocile who bid on my account didn't respond to my email. He wanted greatness, he just couldn't afford it. Or he decided to take the 45 minutes it now takes you to create a 7x Dex unstoppable badass macer. Anyway, I took the opportunity to switch my mains weapon of choice from swords to archery. As I've been doing this it's impossible not to notice how much this game has changed. I have stated in the past that I have been for most of the changes made. I've wavered on that a little and let me tell you why.

Ok supposedly the UO:R was put in to keep new players from quitting because they couldn't handle dying to a rat or pk their first day. It was also put in to keep people from looting your kills, flagging and recalling, etc... Let me tell you a story of Ian's first day in UO. (No I'm not putting this in the fucking story section)

I log on to a shard I forget which. Right away I'm hit with the ability to custom my character. Cool! I made a char similar to my real life likeness but because they didn't have supermodel chiseled looking stud of a character I wasn't able to come all that close. Anyway, I log into the world of "Sosaria" more specifically Brit. I could not believe what I was seeing. Mass people everywhere, real life people playing a character that they could apparently do anything with. I was amazed. I had been playing an online game called magestorm for quite some time and I didn't think anything could beat it. I seemed to know right away that I was playing something much much different that the run of the mill doom style games.

Basically I wandered around figuring things out. I hooked up with some guy who was also a newbie. We proceeded to walk the countryside and loot anything we saw. I remember someone saying "hey those guys are grey" as we walked by. I had no idea what being grey meant. Well I soon found out. I was so pissed, I had in my mind just been pk'd. DAMMIT!!! Death to all pk's. I made a character and called him Furious, because that's what I was after dying like that. I made it known that when I got tougher, I would kill all the big bad evil pk's of the world. One thing I never did was ask someone for help. I did not walk around Brit telling people I was a newbie and asking for gold, or items, or the dreaded, "anything you could spare." The most I ever asked of someone was an answer to a question. Someone was nice enough to show me how fight a dummy and raise my swordsmanship. I had trained for 2 hours getting my swords up to a sterling 25 and my tactics not far behind. I was now ready to do some serious damage and defend myself against these so called "pks". I travel out to the countryside away from the protection of the guards. Hey I had 25 skill points in swords.. who needs guards? So after leaving town I see a great hart. I thought well why not,lets give my new found skill a try on this helpless deer. So I attack this deer with the magic sword I found at the bank. (at the time I could not believe some dumb fool had dropped a "magic" sword.) Haha his loss was my gain. So I attack this deer, and basically it proceeded to absolutely destroy me. It was then that I realized I was going to have to do some serious work to build this character. So did I quit? Did I whine and say that the game was just to hard? Hell no. I went about playing this game for 5-6 hours a day in between my college classes. Shrugging off my girl, my friends, homework..well I shrugged that off anyway. But the point is I took it upon myself to get better. The only reason I stayed in the game was that it presented a challenge. Not only in building a character but I was obviously going to have to outsmart the people that were playing opposite me from their own computers. You see, the entire reason this game fascinated me so much was that anything was possible. Someone could kill me. Someone could loot me. Someone could be a total ass and get away with it. It was up to me not to put myself in these situations or to handle myself accordingly if I I found myself in that sort of predicament. My experience from my first few days gave me the drive to be what I turned into, which was a recognizable force on my shard. Without getting noto'd my first day or without dying to a deer, I would not have had the desire to become good and stick it out until I was able to play and be a badass in my own right. From what I see that is gone. Newbies are in candyland from day one. They go out without any fear of someone killing them or looting them. The most they have to fear is dying to some monster, but no to worry, dying is of no consequence because you can get your stuff back because no one can loot your corpse. Where is the motivation going to come from to get better? Ok maybe eventually they can kill a lich instead of a rat but after that? This game was good because of the atmosphere of the unexpected. Now you can expect the same thing day in and day out. There is no danger. No fear of the unexpected and from my experience, that forboding anticipatory feeling is what made this game great and kept me playing. This negativity may all just stem from the fact that my Stars got their asses handed to them in the worst way last night. Anyway agree with or tell me how bad I suck here.

•THOR'S TOOTHPICK!

Something I got from UO stratics Speils Board....

This just in....this post was made by Cal on the Dev board at 10:30 this morning:
"We've seen many reports that warhammers are doing 70+ points of damage at times. That is simply too high. It's something we are investigating and have disucssed a few solutions already. Nothing is definite yet so I can't say when anything will change.

-Calandryll
Well, there goes my macer. I hope the damage is equal to the Lumberjacker. Then you have a choice what you want to play and it boils down to tactics (and LUCK!) when PvPing fighters.

Who says I can't post information?

Hasta.

UPDATE! As some people have noted in this Forum and the Speils and Rants forum on Stratics, there is a new update in testing:
The following items are currently in testing. Some of these fixes will be in the next update. As these move closer to being updated to the game, they will be moved to the Testing for the Next Update section of the site.
The special attacks for two-handed mace weapons will be reduced to 50% rather than 100% extra. A crushing blow will still be quite effective however. For example, the warhammer will still be capable of doing significant amounts of damage when a crushing blow is achieved (the max will be approximately 60 points, rather than the reported 70 to 80 points).
Falling through floors in the new house designs will be addressed.
Slow moving NPCs and monsters will be addressed.
The ‘rares’ in town chests that were ‘stealable’ before the UO:R publish cannot currently be stolen. This will be fixed so that the items can be stolen.
Trapped chests will no longer give murder counts to the tinker who created the chest.
Issues with thieves not turning ‘gray’ in town will be resolved.
‘Criminally flagged’ characters will no longer be able to go through a moonstone gate.
Improper/Proper house flagging code is being investigated to ensure that the houses are reporting properly.
Client crashes involving the party system, certain regions, and trade windows.

I think this is good. I hope all the weapons are this way as it will REALLY balance the game out alot. Macers are still going to be usable and lumberjackers will be right with them. Additionally, it will give other classes a chance. Those of you with Parry will be able to survive a bit better versus Thor and Hercules. Also, Fencers will be right up there in PvP with their paralyzing attack. I actually believe Fencers will become a bit more popular (again) since they have that attack and, if they are a med warrior, can paralyze you, drop a mage combo on your head, or any variant thereof.

Oh, and for those of you that are thinking about bitching because it's going to be (it sounds like it anyway) an even keel and more balanced with respect to these weapons, just keep it closed and go with it. Alot of you have been whining about it and now it's being "fixed". This makes for variety. And variety is always a good thing.

Thank goodness rares will be available again. Now I don't have to pay exhorbant prices to decorate my home (or rather, my future home; BRING BACK HOUSING BIYOTCH!).

No more bug stealing for you! Nah nah nah nah boo boo! No more outrunning guards! Nah nah nah nah boo boo!

Damn, no more trapped chest murder counts. I see a new (or is it old?) noto-pker coming out. :/ Watch out for those chests you find lieing around everywhere. Also, watch out for chests in dungeons. Use Telekinesis to open it before picking it up. That always helps. If it's locked, move on. If you are a lockpicker, unlock then use Telekinesis. But you guys knew this already right? On the plus side, this will help those guys that carry locked chests on their persons versus thieves. If I remember correctly though, I thought trapped chests didn't give counts and haven't for a while? Someone email me and let me know.

Awesome, houses will be fixed in regards to improper/proper flagging. My friend sold a house a few months ago. A couple of days after the sale, it said "improper". Being the good salewoman she was, she offered to buy it back from the guy so he wouldn't lose it. She was pissed.

Anyway, this all goes to the idealistic opinion that these fixes actually FIXES the bugs and problems we have with UO:R. Go on Test Center. Check it out...and then tell us about it.

Hasta

•All of the Diablo II posts are gone; we have been hacked.

Heh. Just kidding. Anyway, it was kind of hypocritical on my end to tell the updaters to move their off-topic posts to the stories section when I was the one being more off-topic than anyone (luckily, nobody can kick me out of my own site), thus I've decided to make a Diablo II section. If you're interested in knowing about Diablo II beta findings/thoughts/other stuff that nobody cares about, you can find the section here. You may be saying, "why not just make a Diablo 2 site?". The reason is because it's too early to make a Diablo II site at the moment. If I'm going to make a site, it's going to be informative. Fuck news. Fuck news. And fuck news some more. (I hate news - incase you can't tell.) Sure, I could put information about the beta, but the beta is about 1/100th of the whole game and you only get to play the Barbarian with level 1 skills. Plus, some stuff may and usually does change from beta to the final version. Once Diablo II comes out, and I find out what's what, I'll make the site.

Angry will also keep his updates about Diablo II there as well. If not, I will send my bodyguards after him.

•Yes, I'm really this whipped.

Mrs. Angry Bob wanted me to clarify that I wasn't smoking "real" weed. I don't smoke weed at all. Really. I meant it in the metaphorical sense. Kind of like "I don't have the actual numbers handy, so I'll make some up and blame it on being wasted". Being an educator AND a librarian, my wife informed me that I was being a dumb-ass and should stop setting a bad example. I tried to tell her that kids today are having orgies out of boredom before they hit puberty, but she didn't want to hear it. Anyway, welcome to that little slice of having a wife who reads the same sites you write for. Help me. Please.

•Mo' Money, Mo' Money, Mo' Money.

I was smoking weed the other night when I said that potions sold for 40gp and swords sold for under 20gp in the Diablo II stress test. I went back and looked at the actual numbers and found that most of the crap weapons you pick up sell for 1 or 2 gold, while the potions you get with the Find Potion Skill sell for 18gp. not quite as much as I originally said, but 54 gold from three potion in the same amount of inventory space that a 2gp sword takes is still a way better deal.

For those of you wanting loads of cash in UO, use enticement to lure nobles out of town and kill them. They have around 700gp worth of stuff on them and they're easy to kill. Using enticement means you don't have to wait the 15 minutes that actually escorting them imposes on you. You'll also lose a ton of Karma so everyone will think you're a thief and run the hell away from you. Nothing makes people scatter than someone named "The Despicable XXXXXXX" snooping them at a bank.

•Friends.

Friends are what truely make this game great. UO would be nothing if you didn't have friends to join in on your adventures. No matter what you do, people make it better. If you want to go kill people..kill people with your friends..they will watch your back and then someone can verify your story when you say you killed 10 people at once. If you want to sit in a tavern all day..friends make the time fly. Sharing stories of the past. Saying this Id like to wish my very best friend thats ever graced UO, Lexor of Cirrus of Drachenfels, a very happy birthday. Lex and I started out as enemies on a message board, but we grew very close, and its friends like that, that truely make this game worthwhile.

So if I could..id just like to say hi to some of my close friends, past and present, Lex, Lord Hellspawn, Sherd, Dakan, Thanos, Julieanne, Scotti Gael, Madman, Homer, and a slew of others..thanks for being there..thanks for adding to the UO Universe.

•Im back

Well..after a much needed break from UO and the Computer, Im back in the midst of things. Summer is going great, my realationship with my significant other gets better daily, the sun is out, and still no school for months yet. All in all things are going good. Except for Uo. Hokuto has to be the lamest shard ever made. I swear, AOL Legends probably has better PvP action on it right now. What can you say about a server that the top war guild is about 14 wars. Half of those alliances? Bah whatever..ive been spending my days on Drachenfels..getting a guild together. Having fun. I know..fun and UO don't go in the same sentence like it use to. Oh well..we still pay our 9.95 a month don't we?

My interest in PvP is going down rapidly..so im going to try making more posts like Nieves, more of a wide spectrum of topics. Ill still log in *The Murderer Vegeta* but Hokuto's lag is just piss poor right now. Send me some email and tell me what you want me to research..can't leave it all on Paladin's and Nieves feet can we? Im looking to do something new so don't be shy.

•Jorl Treehugger, Day One.

For those of you not following the forum, I said there that I'd be giving daily updates on the progress of my newly minted axe-warrior, Jorl Treecrusher, in his quest for GM lumberjacking.

Today I collected equipment and worked on Jorl's stats ending with 100/27/86 after an hour and a half of snooping and arms loreing back and forth. For those who care, I started him with 44/11/10. He has only the skills I have bought for him to get him to the skill cap. Tomorrow, bone knights and the first skills updates.

•The Freds.

Got this link from the leader of the "Freds". I decided to compare the Bobs and Freds and I noticed that the Freds suck. They wear yellow, cross-dress, have beards that look like shit (really), they're honorable, their site isn't as cool and my link isn't on every page (we can't have that). Bleh. Join the Bobs and kill them. Or don't and kill them anyway.

•E-mail

Now I know how to get E-mail from you people. Jump all over your favorite skill. Ok, let's try this one. Camping sucks, begging sucks, hiding sucks. What's that? Hiding sucks? Yes, unless you are a thief, hiding sucks. If you are a 'PK' and you need to hide, you suck. If you pick a fight, be man, or woman, enough to stand there and take your ass kicking if you can't hang. If you're red and complaining about people attacking you, maybe you should have thought of that before you started offing people?

•Mace Weapons and Parry

Ok, all together now, "One handed mace weapons suck." They suck hard. They are bad. Don't use them. If you have a macer, use the 2 handed weapons and don't use parry. Take archery. Extreme ranged damage added to extreme melee damage makes for a very formidable adversary.

And one other thing. Every character in UO should have GM magery. 50 point heals and guaranteed recalls are always a good thing. You can guarantee recall at something like 82 magery, but you still should have it for the 50 point heals and all around better effects from your spells at GM. I'll make one exception. If your character never leaves the house, it probably doesn't need magery, but then, why do you have a character that never leaves the house?

•Just a quick note.

The page was taking quite a long while to load after the last updates, so I shortened the archived time. It's now set at 3 days. If you miss something, look at the archives. Unlike this page, the monthly archives don't use tables, so the load time is instant.

•New layout and site updates.

Well, I decided it was time for a change. It's been 6 months since I last changed the site and I was getting sick of the gray and yellow colors. I wasn't too fond of the frames, either. It isn't a drastic change, but just to give it some flavor. I hope you guys like it (at least better than the old one), because I'm not planning on editing 152 (I counted, believe it or not) pages for another good 6 months. If the main site takes a bit long to load, let me know and I'll shorten the days to archive (the tables make it so the page loads all at the same time. The more news, the longer it takes to load). I have a 56k, and it only takes a few seconds. We don't have a logo as of yet, but that's ok. I'll work on one. I just wanted to get the site up.

Site updates:

Since stats are so easy to raise now, everything dealing with stats has been moved here. The character creation section has just been changed to what to do and when (IE: raise strength and int; raise healing; etc), instead of work on parrying and maces at the same time, etc. Also dealing with the character creation section - for the warriors, choose what you want for melee. Also, there are no stats on the stats and skills section. Everything is focused on the stat bug. Once the stat bug gets fixed (IE: never), I have a back-up of all of the pages, so no worries about the page being out-dated.

Maces page has been changed. I didn't realize that war hammers had both bonuses (armor/stamina and double damage). That's just stupid.

What KH said about the armor has been added to the armor page.

For the skills main, I stated that you have to mark your primary skill as up in order to passively gain skills (IE: in order to gain lumberjacking from using an axe in combat, swords must be marked as up). Thanks to Jasbrit for the heads up.

On the taming page, a taming tip has been added. That is, if you're trying to tame a high-level monster (dragon, etc), you should fight it until it has 1/10th life, then attempt to tame it. Thanks Violet.

As always, if something doesn't work or isn't right, let me know. I backed up everything just incase. I hope you like the new site.

Thanks to Exwhyze for heavily critizing everything that I tried to do in the creation of the new layout (he made me say that).

•Armour Combos

Unfortunately, the information on the Armour Combo page isn't quite accurate. I tried them out myself with freshly made pieces last night and I got the following optimal combos.

Male Characters w/o Meditation

- Plate Helm
- Plate Gorget
- Plate Chest
- Studded Arms
- Studded Gloves
- Studded Legs

Results - 36AR, -10Dex. It is possible to get 37AR, -10Dex by substituting a pair of bone gloves for the studded gloves, but with bone's shitty durability that AR won't last long.

Female Characters w/o Meditation

- Plate Helmet
- Plate Gorget
- Female Plate
- Plate Gloves
- Studded Sleeves
- Studded Legs

Results - 36AR, -9Dex.

Studded Armour 0 Dex Loss

- Close Helm or Nose (Norse) Helm
- Studded Gorget
- Studded Tunic
- Studded Arms
- Studded Gloves
- Studded Legs

Results - 23AR, no Dex loss. Same bit with the bone gloves works here.

There's no change with the leather armour.

There are a whole range of combos available, depending on how much dex you're willing to lose, but these are the best AR-for-Dex value. Plate and studded are also best to use because of the high HP (durability) of the pieces. Why should this matter to you? Say you've got 2 characters at 36AR. One is wearing an old-style heavy archer, one is wearing the new combo (no shield and forget about dex loss difference for a sec). Each takes a blow from someone using a war hammer. Chances are the hit lands on the chest piece. Of course, the blow damages the armour as well as the player, and since in comparison to plate, chain has much fewer HP, your overall AR is going to fall much faster with the chainmail tunic (especially after the macer bashes it into oblivion).

•::puts on his flannel suit::

I took my Lumberjacker to the Wall last night. At first it was a free for all, but I talked the folks into getting together and making the Wall work. Some folks didn't realize where you had to stand to get parrying gains. Go here if you don't know where. It was pretty decent. Everyone was able to get gains and it was a genuine cooperative effort. Key thing, horses need to stay on the left side. You can't see shit if you bring a horse there. And if you are going, stable your horse. I realized that it's easier if you leave your horse behind. I lost one a few weeks ago with my Macer after I told it to stay (on that night, horses weren't allowed at the wall; I complied with the group's wishes). A bone magi spawned in and ate it while I was busy :/ Bastard. That one was white too :(.

I got him up over 60 healing (FINALLY) and got my lumberjacking close to 70. What sucked is that I was only gaining on average .1 from each Knight I fought. Must've been something I was doing wrong or it was glitched last night. I used a hatchet and put on a wooden shield and a throw away katana when a Knight was on me (so I could gain parrying). Worked fairly well. Over 90 Parrying and Anatomy now, too. I think it's great that you can take a melee character and have him ready to go in a week but it feels so cheap now. Loren will ALWAYS be my favorite character because I WORKED to get her to 3XGM (almost 5). Not saying you guys after UO:R didn't earn it. It was different back then. No power hours for us. Oh, and I didn't macro to get her where she is now.

I took Loren up to Terathans to try and get some fame and karma. Well, it turned out to be a VERY profitable evening. Not because of fame and karma (FAK). That still sucks. I would gain FAK or nothing. That is just stupid. I consistantly gain FAK off liches (even if just a little) at Illustrious, but nothing sometimes from Terathan Avengers? WTF?? It wasn't even profitable because of gold or magic items (loot EVERYTHING you find, people were leaving gold on corpses). I made about 3-4k while there (couldn't carry much more cause I carry alot of shit), and didn't find a single magic item. No, what I found was a REAL trap spot. Now, I am going to show it to you here (this is on GL Trammel). Since I am bringing it to you, I ask that you get out of the way when Loren of da wood shows up and give her top pecking order in looting rights and kills (yeah right!). Just remember to teleport up (where Loren is standing) and down. Cool macro, huh? There is a tree on the south side of the area and bushes/shrubs on the north side the Terathans (or anything for that matter) can't get through (the 2 red [X]'s show you where the vegetation is at). Also, you can get really close to the Terathan Warriors you lure and gain mad Parrying while backing off to heal (the North side). I have always believed TWarriors were better for Parry than knights because they are faster than Knights. But Terathans don't spawn in a little room you can trap them in. If you hunt up there, my suggestion is to have one guy do the running and luring and your party waits for you on top (leaving the teleport spot open of course). Then shoot, melee, magery, and loot in peace. Enjoy :).

I do have a story that was submitted to me. Please go read it. It's hilarious.

I did get on with Clyde to mess around with his lockpicking again. Here is one of the chest spots I told you about west of Yew on Trammel side. I gained more off the 10 chests he has in his pack than the chests there. I got .6 last night. Getting closer. It seems I only gain in the first 20 minutes. I can confirm that most of your lockpicking comes in the first little bit you log on. Anyone else see that?

This shot is of a guy getting "owned" by a Bone Magi. I saw it chasing him near the City of the Dead. He got lit up by a single Flamestrike and just fell down dead. I was laughing my ass off. Sorry guy, it was just hilarious. I wanted to say I killed him myself, but I thought it would be funnier if I just told you the truth. ::grins::

This is a shot of the star room you access using the Brazier in the lower levels of the Terathan Fort. Head west down into the swamp area there when you get down into the main floor of the Fort. Just double click on the brazier over and over, and you are teleported there. Was neat. My friends teleported into the star field and was having a great time. Would be great if some Super Terathan God/dess spawned there and you had to fight it. :)Well, it's Memorial Weekend. I plan on having some fun other than playing UO. Enjoy it everyone. Please don't drink and drive and don't let a friend drive drunk. And just say NO to drugs :) Your mom will thank you for it.

Hasta!

•A couple of corrections...

Well, apparently I was wrong about some stuff on the Diablo II update, so here's an updated update (thought that up myself).

The special arrows (fire, ice, etc) don't exist - it's the bows that get the special abilities. Eh... I like it this way better. There's too many arrows that you can pick up along the way.

Apparently, you can't cast "good" spells on others, because there is no heal other spell that we know of (open beta players only got to play up to level 12 and act 1). Hrmmmm... That would be pretty lame if it doesn't exist at all. But I guess the NPC helpers have to die sometime. In addition to NPC's, you can also hire them to help you. Bleh. I liked it better when it was given out of quest rewards.

What I was right about is that the better belt you have, the more small inventory (potions, etc) space you have. That's cool. Also, when you drink a potion, the potions go down the list. So, say you have a potion in the first slot. If you hit 1 (the hotkey to use whatever is in the first slot), the next potion goes in the first slot. That's cool. I usually died because of this not happening in Diablo I.

I got my e-mail from Blizzard saying that I got in. Heh. Funny. Maybe I'll let Exwhyze (note: we are not gay lovers, as some would say. We are losers that are on 24/7, thus we have a lot in common, thus we hang out a lot, thus...) have it so I can hear him complain about how much it sucks when it really owns. He's a critic. Mainly about stuff that he can't do, which is everything. Hence why he's a critic - jealousy.

•Is the PK Dead?

Sorry I've been gone for so long. Vacation is just that and I needed a good vacation from UO to respark my interest and it certainly has.

I have come to point in UO that I didn't think would happen to me. Before I went on vacation the game had began to get repetitive. I mean I would PvP with my red mage and with Galahad and my tamer would kill everything in sight with his dragons. Day in and day out that is what I would do. I would win a lot of fights, lose a few, and make buttloads of money with my tamer. To me that was getting boring.

So now I have come to a decision that many will flame me for. I am gonna make my mage who is close to being a 7 times tank mage into a mage with the 5 standard mage skills (Magery, EI, Med, Wrestling, Resist) and GM hiding and stealth. For all those who have played for a long time when there was no stat loss or even those who play on Siege now know that the PK was the evil in Sosaria. Most of the old time Pks left a long time ago but those who were there know that those were the days. It is a rush to have a red come on your screen and attack you. I am turning myself into that red.

So for you on Atlantic....evil will soon return to Sosaria. Be ready.

•Eh, he's jesus...plenty to go around.

I got to play for a few hours this morning after work. Here's what I discovered:

Here's the easiest way to get money.
1. Spend a skill point on Find Health Potion.
2. Spend another skill point on it.
3. Use the skill every time you kill something.
4. Pickup all the potions you get from the corpses.
5. Leave the crap swords and other stuff on the ground. Swords take up 3 spots in your inventory and sell for under 20 gold. Potions take 1 spot and sell for 40. You do the math.
6. Make sure you still check out everthing you find though. It'd be a shame to leave a magic or socketed item laying on the ground.

Socketed items are cool. They're sort of like the items in FF7 that you put materia in. I found a socketed spiked club and put a chipped topaz in it. now it does an additional 1-6 points of lightning damage. You can mix and max the gems you want to add to get whatever sorts of effects you want.

Get Mace mastery. Blunt weapons get a 50% damage bonus against undead. Since just about everything in the game is undead, it adds up quick.I like spiked clubs alot. They have a damage range of 5-6 points of damage. That way I know I'm always doing at least 5 points of damage. most other weapons have a range of 1-whatever. I just like the consistency.

Bash uses to much mana to be useful in most fights. Save the skill points for Find Health Potion. It's the best skill in so far. The potions you get using it are better than the ones you can buy, they sell for a ton of loot, and it's really nice to have a never-ending supply of potions.

I did have a good bit of lag though. It didn't look like there was because Everything was still moving, but it was just client side. When stuff got all adjusted, half the monters on the screen would fall over dead or be in different places than they were. I don't think it was Fallen teleporting, I think it was lag spikes. I also got dumped from the server twice.

I also can't find anyplace to change my resolution.

•Wrong, Bob. Jesus loves me.

Well, a visitor (I was asked not to say the name) played Diablo II open beta and decided to give me his stress beta cd key. Woohoo! You own, man. Thank god I decided to download it when I went to sleep last night; just incase I got in. Anyway, onto Redrum's Excellent Review That You All Love™...

Lag
Battle.Net's servers are as stable as you can get. I did not lag once. I did not get a connection loss once. I did not freeze up once. Everything was as smooth as you can get. This was during semi-peak hours. I usually lag after noon anyway. Not with this game.

How it runs
I have a 366 mhz, 128 RAM, voodoo 1 card and a 56k connection. As said with the connection, I did not lag once. But how smooth it runs makes it even better. Nothing was slow, ever. There was no lag, bugs, glitches, slowdowns, etc. In Diablo I (and every other game), running through portals and going through zones takes forever to load. Not in Diablo II. It's instant. If it wasn't for the level highlight (shows level when you enter a zone), you wouldn't even notice that you're on a different level - in terms of switching zones.

Battle.Net
What's different about Battle.Net is that the names are on the bottom. Here's a screenshot of how it looks. Personally, I liked it when it would show the names, levels, difficulties, etc on a list on the right side. Oh well. I'll live. What's cool is that your Battle.Net username is not your characters' name. Thus, I can be named "Redrum" and not "Redrum........."(I own it).

Gameplay
There's just one thing that I can say about this game: addictive. I did not want to stop playing. In fact, I was pissed when it ended. I was getting really into it and wanted to play it all day long. Regardless of the fact that you only get to play the Barbarian with level 1 skills and a few quests, it's still fun and long. It took me two hours to finish it, and that's just a little piece of the game.

The game is so easy to get used to. If you recall how easy Diablo was to get the hang of - Diablo II is literally the same. There is nothing that will take you forever to find out. I was up and rolling the second that I started playing. I did not need to look at the help or say to myself "what the fuck am I supposed to do?".

Characters
The characters are perfectly balanced - as far as I can tell. True, I only played the Barbarian, but you can just tell it's balanced. The Barbarian, obviously, is used for melee only. I could not use a bow even if I had enough stats to use it. It simply would not let me. That's cool. Some characters can do certain things and the others can't. What can the Barbarian do? Wield two weapons at the same time. Woo! Here's a screenshot of me with a sword and an axe equipped at the same time and a portal. The Barbarian seems just right. He kicks some serious ass with melee, but he can't use distance attacks (archery, magery, etc). He gets his ass handed him when spells are casted on him also.

NPC's
What I particularly liked is how the NPC's would show up on the map. If there's an NPC nearby, their name and a symbol will show up, so you know there's one out n' about. What's different about Diablo II is that NPC's don't just stay in town. The NPC's are scattered all over the place. You meet a lot of them that will help/caution you on your travels. What's also cool is that the NPC's aren't there for your needs all of the time. In Diablo I, all of the NPC's were in town and would identify, create, etc stuff for you whenever you wanted. In this game, that doesn't happen. I don't want to give anything away, so let's just say that you have to free some of them in order to get their services. NPC's that you meet along the way also sell different stuff to you. They also do quests...

Quests
Like I said on the review of the recently released Diablo II movie, the quests are easy. When someone is going to give you a quest, there's an explanation mark above their name on the map. The quest location that they give is usually really nearby, so you shouldn't have any problems finding where you need to go.

Let's say that there's a quest given to you by an NPC. What you need to do is go to a location. Once you get to that location, the quest window pops up and says something like, "kill all of the monsters". If you seem to be having trouble finding them for a period of time, it says how many monsters are left. Anyway, after you kill all of the monsters it will say something like, "kill such-and-such". Once you kill such-and-such, the quest window pops up yet again and says "go to NPC-that-gave-you-the-quest for a reward". What's cool about this is that there's sub-quests. It's not just find place, kill monster, get item - like in Diablo I.

What's also cool is the reward. Sure, you get your special item when killing a boss, but you also get a reward from the NPC that gave you the quest. The rewards are sweet. The first time, I got a free skill advance. The second time, I got an NPC to help me when I'm fighting. Speaking of that, if I wasn't the Barbarian, you can also cast "good" spells (heal, cure, blah blah blah) on them if they need it.

Monsters
What's cool is how many different special abilities monsters have. In Diablo I, it was just usually melee, archers and spell-casters (fire, inferno, lightning - that's about it). In this game, it's a whole new ballpark. In the beginning, there's a group of small monsters and a leader. The leader can bring his bitchlings back to life, and he won't stop until you kill him. There's also monsters that can cast cool stuff on you. Instead of your basic fireball, they can literally do everything you can do - if not more. Here's a screenshot of a monster casting a spell that slowed me and my NPC-helper down. There was some monsters that would cast fire arrows, teleport, etc, etc, etc. I didn't feel the need to take screenshots of them all though. What's also interesting is that some monsters run fast and cast/shoot spells/arrows at will. Once you go up to them, they usually teleport or run like crazy. The NPC archer I had was kicking some ass with them types though. That's cool. I dislike when one character can do everything.

Loot
Money is very hard to come by. In Diablo I, you would get like 50 gold per skeleton. In this game, you get about 2 gold per skeleton. The majority of them don't even give you anything. On the stress test, there's about 5 levels and some woods (I think). The total amount of gold that I got was about 300 gold. The only way to make a half-assed profit is to pick up everything and sell it. You also get a bank in town to stash some stuff incase you don't want to take it with you.

Items
Like I said in the review for the movie that I seen, finding items is easy. They're very hard to see, but you can hit alt to make all items on your screen highlight. Here's a screenshot. The blue items are magic items and the white ones are regular.

There's more stuff to equip this time. In addition to rings, chest, etc that are in Diablo I, there's boots, arms, hands, and the belt area. I believe (not sure) that the better belt you get, the more small inventory (place to put potions and other 1 space taking items) gets bigger. I'm not sure about this, however. This is just a guess. It sounds right - to me anyway. Also, if you pick up a piece of armor that you can wear, it automatically equips instead of going into the inventory.

What's interesting is the potions. In Diablo I, there was regular and full heal/mana potions. In Diablo II, there's a variety. From what I seen so far, there's light, minor, regular and full potions. What I particularly like is how they work. Instead of drinking a potion and immediately getting cured, it takes time - depending on the potion. If you drink a light health potion, your life will refresh very, very slowly. If you drink a full potion, your life immediately refreshes to full.

There's also tons of more items that we've never seen before. There's throwing knives, explosive potions and a shitload more. There's also arrows. Archers will need arrows this time around. Woo! No more free shots for you. In addition to that, there's more advanced arrows. The only kinds that I seen are arrows and bolts. From reading around, there's also fire, ice, etc arrows later on in the game.

Graphics
The graphics are nothing dazzling and they're fairly out-dated, but hell, I don't care. Like I said yesterday, graphics don't make the game. The game as a whole makes the game. Graphics are just a side-dish. If it was graphics that were so important, nobody would be playing UO (can't get a better example than that). The graphics look like Diablo and Starcraft. That's fine with me.

Well, that's about it. I couldn't test the skill trees because you only get the first level. You can tell that it's going to be cool though. It shows major skills, then sub-skills branching off. There's also a lot of cool new skills that you get (IE: make monsters run away, etc).

I like it a lot. I haven't this much fun in a game in a long time. Hell, this is just a very, very limited beta. I'm definately going to buy it. I can't wait to play the whole thing. It better win a game of the century award. If it doesn't, I'm going to kill whoever's responsible for giving out the award. Now that's loyalty.

•Another one down...

Well, I GM'd Tailoring last night around 2:30am. Total number of hides to get through the 90s was just short of 15,000, and gain was at a rate of about 1 - 1.8 per burst hour. Taking it easy & working primarily in burst, it took me about 2 weeks to go from 0 to GM... you can probably do it even faster if you're willing to work Tailoring out of burst.

This was the first merchant skill I've GM'd since the UO:R changes, and I have to say it was pretty easy in comparison to pre-patch.

•Information

It seems people keep asking us for information on certain skills/monsters/tips. Great. I don't mind. But as Paladin and Red keeps telling you, please check the menu on the left of this page to see if the information you are looking for is there before emailing us or asking in the forum. It's not that we don't want to help. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't. Just that alot of your questions are answered in that section. And, it might be awhile before you get an answer in the forum since not alot of people post to it these days :/.

Additionally, I will try to stay out of the PvP questions/comments for now. People keep disagreeing with my limited experienced filled answers on the subject and I want to save myself the emberrassment. When I get better, and can prove even further some of the things I wrote about, I will write on them later. Better to have proof to support your arguements right? Email Paladin for those types of questions. He seems to know more about the game than I do anyway :).

I logged on with Clyde yesterday playing around with lockpicking again. I gained .6. I used the same 10 chests and stayed inside the Delucia Inn (so I could just log out when done). I would lock the 10, pick them, run across the Inn (could be considered over 15 tiles of movement), relock and repick. Was going pretty good for a bit. After 10 minutes of no gain, I said screw it and logged him off. Right now he's at 80.4 displayed. Only 4.6 points to go! ARGH! Anyway, it's going up, and that's all I want right now. Gawd, I hate to think about Cartography right now. I hate raising that skill! Even before UO:R.

I did mess around with my Macer and Lumberjacker. Getting closer and closer to the point where I can move my macer to Felucca. My Macer is near GM macing and getting very high in Parrying. People keep saying they would drop Parrying for Magery on this type of character. I don't want to limit my options. 2 handed weapons suck ass against multiple opponents and I want the opportunity to take 2 on 1 if ganged....OOPS! I am talking PvP. Sorry. :] After GMing Parrying, I will be ready for Archery. Here Spider Spider!!! The Lumberjacker is almost GM parrying which is cool for him. Healing and Anatomy is going up at a good rate for them. They can almost cure poison now which is great :).

I am sorry my stories have been slow in coming. Haven't really been playing with Loren since the focus has been Clyde, the Macer and the Lumberjacker.

Anyway, have a great day.

Hasta.

•Raising Combat Skills

These days it seems like every third question on the forum is, "How do I GM archery?" It's been answered, repeatedly I might add, by several patient, kind individuals of which I am not one. The answer to this question, and all the associated questions(i.e. sword, mace, fencing, wrestling, anatomy.) is the bone knight room in Deceit. Yes, the famous wall is the best solo way to gain combat skills. Join up with the folks there and kill critters. Candyland is safer to do it in, but has all the odd healing restrictions. Better to do it in the old lands where you can heal everyone and they can heal you. Remember, it is a cooperative effort, everyone is trying to do the same thing. You heal them, they heal you.

The other way is to get a group of friends together and cast some Blade Spirits for entertainment. So long as you don't use anything to keep the BS from moving, it is perfectly legal for you to fight them for skill gain. One person should always attack the BS, and the others should heal that person.

Easy enough. If you have any questions, E-mail me.

•Jesus loves me this I know because Blizzard tells me so...

I just checked my e-mail and discovered I was one of the 100,000 people to get to play the Diablo stress test. I'm downloading it right now, as I type this very update. From what I hear, you can only play the Barbarian and it only has the level one skills. I don't care though. Once again my giant loincloth-clad, tattooed ass will be running around with an axe, screaching a mighty war cry while I chop crap in half. The difference; It's in a computer game and I won't get arrested. Stay tuned!

•One more step into finalization.

Well, the Diablo II Stress Test started some time today. I didn't get my e-mail, but that's ok. Since 100k people get picked, they're sending e-mails in groups. There should still be a few days to get yours if you didn't get selected yet. It'll be interesting to see what the game is like if I get in. It better be good, because I've been wanting this game since the day it was announced. What a waste of 2 years it will be if it sucks. I highly doubt that it will suck though.

•Chat.

There's an interesting chat with the developers/programmers/janitors for a handful of MMORPG's on Lum's that you can find here.

Interesting... I disagree with Balseraph when he said technology is the key to a good story. You don't need technology to have a good story. Like LeeS said, you need a good storyteller to have a good story. In order to have a good story, you need to make it so the story actually impacts the game. I'll throw in two examples about a good story and a bad story that I made up (no games accomplished having a good story, thus I have to make them up):

1. A city is captured by a group of monsters. You have to defeat the monsters in order to get the city back. Once you get the city back to its regular state, you get a special reward (say, a spell that will be needed to kill the boss in the next quest - nothing else will work). Sure, it could be more complex and better, but I don't feel like thinking of a long ass story at the moment. But anyway, it impacts the game. The quest item that you receive is needed in order to defeat a boss. Without out, you can't, and you might miss out on whatever the next quest has to offer. Plus, you get a unique spell that nobody else has. That's two plusses.

1. A city is captured by a group of monsters. You kill the monsters and the city is returned and everyone lives happily ever after (remind you of the Trinsic quest on UO?).

Story A is good, while story B sucks. I'd rather play a game with shitty graphics, etc that has stories like A; than play one that has amazing graphics and stories like B any day of the week. If there was a game with good graphics and stories like A and one that has shitty graphics and stories also like A, then sure - I'd rather play the one with good graphics. But technology isn't what makes a game. There isn't a better example than EQ. It has excellent technology, but the game blows big time.

•GRAB BAG TIME!

::reaches into the bag::
Hi Nieves,
Im Discord from the forum and I just wanted to let you know again how much I enjoy your posts! When I was a newer character I used to read this page religiously for skill gain tips. Then Red quit UO and the page just turned to crap, well that and all his info was dated and useless, anyway I was just about to say screw it and delete my bookmark until he had you new updaters. I have to say Im not a pvp person unless it's forced upon me and your stories of hunting monsters and besting the bad guys(the pk tamer at titans) really gave me a reason to keep coming to the page. To be honest it's the ONLY reason I come to the powergamers website. Too bad you dont play catskills :) We could hunt together sometime hehe
Well anyway Im sure you get tons of fan mail but I just wanted to let you know how much I love your posts and to keep them coming! :)

Thanks
Discord


Gotta lov it :) I don't get tons of fanmail. Just a little bit. But when I get it, it's great. :) Keep writing in! Bad, good, or indifferent. And I don't mind being corrected either. That just makes me a better updater. Maybe I should make a character for every other shard named "Nieves" just to say hello? Nah, that's overkill. Oh, and let me have my 5 minutes of fame. :) This doesn't last long.

Next!


My guildmate on Cats is an up-and-coming tamer. That code you encountered is part of the fix to people stacking to avoid the monsters. If anything's on the same tile as you, it says they're in the way and you cannot loot. We haven't done much testing with it, but apparently it checks to make sure the looter is next to the chest, or close to the chest, or some such. My friend had a mongbat next to him, and both were adjacent to the chest, and we had to kill it off so he could start looting. I think it has to do with monsters targetting the looter or some such. in addition to the stacking-on-a-tile cheesiness people did. I know they can be looted while spawn exists, as I would often attack the monsters as soon as they spawned, to get them on me. Sometimes they stood next to him casting at me, other times we ran around a bit. Either way, while I was dealing, he was looting. :)Thought that might help. You'll learn it soon enough, I'm guessing.
-Cocytus


Thanks for the information. Even though I knew they fixed stacking I didn't know that you couldn't loot while the thing was next to you. Thanks! Now I know to make the spawn run after me when I dig up a chest. It's not like I stand there when an Ogre Lord or Dread Spider spawn in anyway :).

::reaches into the bag for another letter::


I played UO last year for about 6 months, one of my characters is a "pure" dungeon rogue - he does not fight. He is near GM in hiding, stealth, lockpicking, detect hidden, etc. He has 96.9 lockpicking currently, and there is no chest he cannot open on the first try. because he never breaks a lockpick, he uses a set of "newbie" lockpicks that rez with him.
Upon re-entering UO about 2 months ago I was shocked at the amount of locked chests of gold laying around. I decided to add lockpicking to my GM Dex Monkey Fencer Guy. With the assistance of my GM Tinker, how hard can this be? This is when I encountered the new anti-macro code. AAAAARRRRRGG! Include in this the "difficulty based gains" system, and it becomes a real chore to raise lockpicking. Basically, I "Powergamed" skill raising as much as possible. This approach is to use a TON of lockpicks on really hard chests, breaking most of them, to gain skill fast. I also made a bag of 12 GM tinker made boxes and their keys. I set up a macro using UOA to pick each box (and later relock each box). This worked fairly well, but it seemed to fizzle a bit after a while. Somewhere in the mid 80's, I just dropped the bag on the bank floor - it was no longer of any use to me.
First you get to the stage where you can open the chests with about 100gp in them. Then, you get to the chests that have around 300gp in them - I am at that stage now. Currently my lockpicking is at 91.7 on the Fencer. I have been able to open the 300's since around the upper 80's I believe. The next stage are the ones that have up to 800gp in them, and the chance of GOOD magic weapons (I got a silver bow of Power from one last week). They are located in places such as: Lich Lord room- Deceit, Balron room - terrathan fort, Blood Ele spawn - 3rd level Shame. Using your "burst hour" is key to good gains when lockpicking. Have everything ready to go---plenty of lockpicks, runes to good lockboxes --- well before you log on for your hour. good places to Powergame gains are the tough boxes in the semi-secret room on the first floor of the Warriors Guild, across the bridge SE of Britain; and the 12 chests on the floor of the Magincia bank. ( I play in Fellucia on the Pacific Shard, actual toughness may vary). At 91.7, I still cannot open these. If someone with a near-GM picker comes along and opens these, it may take 24 hours for them to reset. Since I passed 90 skill, something strange has happened. It seems the I am "locked" at around .2 skill gain per day - max, done, finished, the end. I once broke over 300 picks, on 30-40 tough (unopenable) chests after my daily .2 gain, all for nothing. The good thing is, now that I know this - I log on, recall to the Warriors guild boxes, gain .2 in 2 minutes, recall back to my house, log off. The daily routine. I use around 5 picks a day, spend less than 5 minutes training. I figure it will take around 95 lockpick to open the 700+gp chests, at 91.7 now......that means.... roughly, the end of next month sometime. I think this system is totally stupid, and boring. But, maybe my experiences can help you some. BTW, once you can open the 700+ chests you can make huge cash. My rogue can make 15,000gp plus the chance of good weapons and armor in a single hour.

Later,
Shanty

ps. Don't forget to pickup and sell the gems, they stack in you pack so they don't take up many items, or weight. Last time I sold off my gem bag it weighed only 9 stone, but I got over 4000 gp from the provisioner!


Wow! Alot of information. Did you get it all? I hope so :) There are a number of different ways to make a "living" in UO. Pick one that's best for you and go with it :)

Some of you have asked me about sending in stories of your adventures and how to post them. Just send them into me and I will post them. Just no comments about "that's gay" or "you are gay", no porn, be descriptive, and have fun with it.

Hasta!

•UO Loop.

Well, it seems the link to Dr. TwisTer's for UO Loop doesn't work either, so I uploaded it to this domain. You can find it here.

•Having Fun With Tamers

I have decided to share my shameful story with you here. On another note, I should have some final Tailoring and Parry info for you in a day or so.

•Storytime!!!

Hiya kids! It's that time again for Nieves' afternoon story. Check it out here or in the stories section.

•Candy from a baby...

Hiya ALL! How was your weekend? Mine was up and down.

Let's begin talking about it shall we?

Stat gains. I will say it again. Do as Paladin tells you! Get to those 700 points, lock all your other skills and use the appropriate skills to gain the appropriate stats. I got my treasure hunter to 100str/93int using Mining and Spirit Speak. My lumberjacker got to 100str/100dex using Snooping (newly released packhorse) and Arms Lore. Careful because Arms Lore gave me some int. What was weird is that Arms Lore was also giving me dex. But who's complaining? I managed to get my macer up to 85dex using Snooping and Arms Lore but had to do it over because GL crashed HARD Saturday night and they had to warp it all back. Dammit. It's ok, I got him back up to 85 dex the next morning in one pour hour.

Twinks. When I was working my lumberjacker, I had a packhorse I released in the fenced in area outside the stables I would use for snooping. This guy comes up and starts taming it. I told him over and over NOT to tame it and to please to let me have the pack horse back so I could continue my snooping. The dude tells me he will give me back the packhorse if I give him my horse. He says that he had been having problems finding a horse to tame. I was like: "What?" He says: "Give me your horse, I will give you the packhorse". I told him there are plenty of horses outside the East Gate of Delucia. Go get one. He just says: "Give me the horse, I will give you the packhorse" again. My response? "Fuck you". I go, get 900 more gold, and buy another packhorse. I see him later trying to sell the packhorse to the stable master. I called him a dumbass and finish getting to 100 dex. WTF is up with people? Shit.

Dragon Tamers: Look, if you feel the need to kill stuff to get loot with your Dragon, go fight Titans, Dragons, or Balrons with them. Leave the Lich Rooms and like Dungeons alone. Bad enough we can't do shit to you in Trammel, but do you have to show up with 2-3 Dragons to get your loot/fame? I mean, C'mon? That is just plain stupid. You know you are the shit now so go prove it OUTSIDE of those areas. This guy showed up in the Lich Lord room Friday with 2 Dragons and starts clearing the place out of spawn. I just sighed and recalled out. No sense arguing with Tiamat is there?

I got to see the Star room for the first time this weekend. It was way cool. I had never been that deep into Terathan Fort as it was just plain suicide before the UO:R patch on GL. Either the Avengers got you or someone would block, pk, or steal from you. Maybe it was just my luck.

Some asshoLe (::winks at Red::) stole my kid's bike Sunday. Man. Have you ever had your bike stolen when you were a kid? That just out and out SUCKS! If the person that stole my kids bike is reading this site (which I doubt), I hope you hit a bump and fall onto the handle bars breaking off your dick for stealing my kids bike. It was rough watching him cry. It was his Christmas present dammit. :[

Movies. Dinosaur: a way cool movie. The graphics were great, the Fight scenes between a plant eater and a T-Rex were just amazing. I actually enjoyed that Disney movie with my kids. And if you have anything stupid to say about it, kiss my ass. I loved it :) Take your kids or your significant other to see it as well ::winks:: Battlefield Earth-too long, presentation of the plot was "eh", action scenes were boring, and acting was suspect. Worth it if you rent it for 3 bucks. Definately not if you are going to pay 7 bucks.

Lockpicking. I can't gain a damn point. ::sighs:: Clyde is stuck. That guy with the chests, get with me ASAP! I want to try what you suggested. I will tell all you about it when I try his method.

Anyway, I got work to do. Talk 'atcha later.

•New movie.

There's a new UO flash movie over at "Pimp Style Productions" that you can find here. Personally, I thought it was cool. It's the first time I even seen their site. The site is pretty cool too... Except KaLiBaH. He's not cool.

•Real magic? Does it exist?

Well, I was bored so I decided to go to a magic card trick site. Wow, magic does exist. Go to the site and see what magical powers that person holds. Go now and read no further. You will be amazed.

After thinking to myself "what the fuck", "omg", "wow" for about an hour straight, I finally realized how much of an idiot I am. If you're an idiot, such as myself, go here to find out how it's done.

... Funny. It had me fooled. But then again, I'm an idiot - as said numerous times already.

When nobody is updating, any update is welcome... Maybe.

•Just a quick Fishing update...

It seems that you need a base amount of skill to fish up a SOS now. According to what I've heard, you now need at least 65 in Fishing to be able to pull up the chest and the pre-chest rares. I tried it with a character locked at 0 skill, and sure enough, no chest. I'm not going to train another character up to 65, so someone else will have to confirm what skill level is necessary. Just keep this in mind if you're thinking of buying SOSs off of vendors...

•OMG, I'm updating!

It's been a while since I've updated. The other guys have been doing a great job and I didn't have anything important to write, so I just haven't posted anything. Even though this isn't about getting skills or money, it's still damn important: Go test housing and send feedback to the Dev Team. The code's really messed up. Somehow people are able to place more than one house with the same character and refresh them all. People are also getting "trapped" in the new houses as well.

I was going to use my Young account to do write-ups to all the dungeons similar to what I did with the wall, but going into dungeons removes your young status. Did anyone else know that? I sure as hell didn't. Hythloth + 45 strength = oooOOOooo.

•Forum Questions About Specific Skills

Before you post a question to the forum about how to raise a specific skill, check to see if it is covered in the coincedintally titled stats and skills section. You'll get a faster answer than on the forum. If your question isn't covered, then post away, but asking questions that have already been answered doesn't do much good, because a lot of the time you'll just get pointed in the direction of the already existing info anyway. This has been said before, by Red, but needed to be mentioned for new visitors to the site. Have a good one.

•Small update and movie.

The tailoring page has been updated with what KH said a few days ago. Also, there's a small Neverwinter Nights movie here. It's 14.25 MB's, and doesn't show a whole lot of gameplay. It's 55 seconds long... 20 of those seconds is gameplay footage.

•Shlink!

That's the sound Wolverine's claws make when they extend. If you don't know what I am talking about, go check out the trailor. It's going to be awesome. Now if they would only get Spiderman and Daredevil done, I would be happy. I read those comics as I grew up and they were entertaining. Not just for their "art" but for the story and drama they provided. Anyone remember when the X-Men were supposedly dead and wound up Down Under? Anyone remember Spiderman's time with the Black Cat? Or when the X-Men split up into X-Calibur? Man, those were awesome stories. Go to your local Comic Shop and check it out.

I got on with Clyde last night and got him to 92 Strength and 81 Intelligence. Listen to what Paladin_VT is saying. He knows what he's talking about. My only question is can I do this by just locking all my skills but the two I will be using to gain stats? Will that work? I will test it sometime with my newer characters. I stopped working with Clyde as my partner needed to get hides to GM her tailoring. She's almost there (99.7). Cheer her on. She could use the encouragement. :) I was messing around with my Lumberjacker and he is still gaining lumberjacking by fighting. Awesome.

I also logged on with my Miner/Smith (since I had all those ingots from Clyde mining) and decided to do some blacksmithing. I finally got up to 60 and was happily making shields, katanas, female plate, etc. I made an exceptional heater shield I gave to someone so that was cool.

I ran into a brand new character that was VERY upset about how certain weapons should be better than others (ie-Katana vs. Longsword) and how you should not get hit as often with higher dex. I told him this isn't D&D (you get bonuses to your AR in AD&D with higher Dex) and that he needs to realize this is a different game with VERY different rules. Play within the rules and you will be happy. Everyone just needs to quit bitching everytime something is different with UO/OSI. Granted, I agree some of the shit should've been fixed a LONG time ago, but the game is NOT that bad. For PvP, Fighters have different options on how to they want to play. They can be archers, Axe Fighters, Macers (best right now), Fence Monkeys, and Sword/Parriers. Mages now have to play TRUE mages. With the way Mind Blast seems to be working, I think it's great. No longer can you swing a weapon like a fighter. And that's GOOD! Quit bitching, play the game, and try all the new options. You might actually LIKE playing it that way.

Oh...and I say this from a totally non-PvP viewpoint. ::grins::

I did hook this new character (I hate the term "NEWBIE"!) with some GM armor, weapons (one silver, one force) and gave him tips on how to develop his character. Even warned him that Bulls will kick his ass as a beginning character, but they give the best gains for fighting skills in the beginning (outside of Bone Knights). It's always good to help people. Try it, you might like it.

In other news, a new variant of the ILOVEYOU virus is out and about. This one is supposedly sneakier and meaner. Be aware of it. You can read about it here. Asshoes.

Seems OSI is thinking about implementing Colored Leather into the game. I think Arcadian Del Sol at Lum's is right, they should go with options 2 and 3 (jump over to the link above and you will see what I am talking about). Would be great to get Dragon's Leather or Green Ostard Leather. :) Hell, Nightmare leather would probably look awesome as well (I shudder to think what all the Tamers in all the shards are going to do to me now when they see me ::EAT MY NIGHTMARE BIYOTCH!::). My only question is, why the FUCK are they worried about colored leather when they should be getting factions and housing finished? Fix what's wrong NOW! Worry about new "bells and whistles" later. BRING BACK HOUSING BIYOTCH!!!

My friend ICQed me last night that he was having trouble with getting off of a roof somewhere he teleported up (running from a bad spawn). He left his recal runes in the bank because he wanted to just travel the lands that evening messing around. The new "you are number ##" status system OSI put in the last patch was pretty cool. You know where you are in the que and know how long you might have to wait to get help. Well, he called for GMs to help and had to wait for hours to get off. He got a countdown of where he was in the que. Very helpful right? Here is a a picture of what it looked like. I tried REALLY hard not to laugh but I couldn't help snicker a bit. He was stuck and couldn't get down ("I have fallen and..."). Don't get me wrong, that fucking sucked being up there. I don't think they should've made him wait that long. All the GM said to him when he got teleported off the roof was: "Sorry you had to wait so long. Hope you have a great evening". Yeah. Right. 2 hours on a roof waiting for Mr. FireChief to come :/ Sorry Talgic, that sucked.

Have a great weekend folks. I am going to go out and watch some movies with my family.

Adios.

•Site updates.

The healing page was updated just a tad. It just states that the new way to gain healing is by just regular healing - instead of healing, curing and ressurecting. The PvM section was updated with the following monsters: Air Elementals, Earth Elementals, Fire Elementals, Poison Elementals, Water Elementals, Ogre Lords, Ogres, Drakes, Gargoyles, Wyverns, Gazers. It's about 75% complete now. If you have a suggestion, comment or anything else regarding the PvM section, contact Nieves.

Also, if I don't respond to your e-mail or don't update the site with something that you suggested, it isn't because I didn't read what you said, so please don't send the same thing multiple times. I read all of my e-mails and forum posts, but I can only do one thing at a time. Eventually, I'll get around to it. Thanks.

•Raising Stats.

Hola all. I've noticed that a lot of people want to know the fastest ways to gain Strength/Dex/Int under UO:R. The first thing you have to do is get to the skill cap. If you're rich, just go around to NPC's and buy up skills to the point where you have 700, but DO NOT buy the skills you are going to be using to gain stats. That would be self defeating.

Best skills for raising STR are Herding, Taming, Macing, and Parry. Mark one up, take it to 10 and stop, then mark it down and pick another skill in the group and mark it up. Go to 10. Repeat, ad infinitum.

DEX Best skills here are Snooping, Hiding, and Fencing. Do just like above for STR.

INT The best way to do this one is to combine it with STR, since it will be going up automatically with magery and med. Use Arms Lore and one of the strength skills back and forth and you will get intelligence and strength up quickly.

One last note. In the burst hour, you can continually target one item for skills like arms lore so you don't have to do a macro targeting multiple items.

•GRAB BAG TIME!

:) time for some letters.

From: TheProQuo
To: majickal@hotmail.com Save Address
Subject: Enjoyed your story.
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 12:34:11 EDT

My gang and I did a level 5 map on that island shortly before UO:R patch. Upon opening the chest, we were visited by 2 Daemons, 2 Bloods, and a Poison. Since I was the closet to them, I got targeted. My Semi-intellegent friend decide to cast a firefield to kill them, and I was soon bombarded my Flamestrikes, ebolts, poisons, and other nasty spells. 2 seconds later, I was being rezzed.
Although we didn't get any more maps from the creatures, I did pull a quarterstaff of power of a daemon and a ring tunic of hardening of a blood. Like you, Im going to be doing more Treasure maps.
Keep up the good stories. I've been using them to determine Risk Vs
Reward for guild hunts. Every place your group enjoyed, mine did as well. Oh, Daemon Temple is horrible place for a group to go, but great for 1-2 mages. I also here from my tamer buddies that its a great place for tamers to get dragons now that Destard is a "deathtrap."

ProQuo

Awesome. I love hearing your stories. Keep em coming. And thank you for the information on Daemon temple hunting. I will have to remember that when the "gang" and I decide to go on a hunt somewhere (Temple sucks, Destard is a no-go).

NEXT!

>Smelting has always been the best way to raise. Many people are complaining that since the patch smelting is the only way to gain. I have done 2 miners (one got to GM and the other is at 96) and I always got the best gains in my smelting. The more you smelt the more it checks your skill and the quicker you go up. If you have done a lot of mining, you know that there are 4 types of ore
>that you can get. There is the big one that produces 2 ingots and weight 12 stones, the small ball shaped one that produces 1 ingot and weight 7 stones,the one that is about the same size as the big one but is scattered that produces 1 ingot and weights 7 stones. And last but not least, is the little piece of ore that weights 2 stones that needs 2 of these to get 1 ingot (this last one is the type of ore that you want to use when you smelt).
>
>Now, here is where it gets confusing and I hope I can explain this clearly. A large ore weights 12 stones and produces 2 ingots. One of the small ore weights 2 stones, 2 of these will produce 1 ingot and this weights 4 stones (2 ore * 2 stones = 4 stones). Which means to yield the same amount of ingots as the large ore, you would need 4 small ore (4 ore * 2 stones = 8 stones). I hope you are still with me on this. What that means is that 4 small ore produce the same amount of ingots as 1 large ore, but weights 4 less stones. And that means is that you can carry a lot more ore this way. For example, take 15 large ore. This 15 ore will produce 30 ingots and the ore weights 180 stones. If you take that 15 ore and combine it into small
ore you will now have 60 small ore that will produce 30 ingots and weights 120 stones!

Now the difference in smelting is that instead of smelting the large pile of ore 1 at a time (so you are smelting 15 times), you are now smelting the other pile of ore 2 at a time (so you are smelting 30 times). So you have just doubled the possibility of raising your mining. When I go out mining, I have a bag with one small ore of each of the colors. And I just keep combining the large ore into the small ones and I can really carry a lot more ore. My miner can carry 276 stones of ore. So that is 23 large ore which is 23 smelting attempts. By combining the ore into the small pile, I can now carry 92 small ore which is 46 smelting attempts. (BTW I only smelt ore 2 a time for the color and I am on and 2 colors below that. The rest I just smelt all at one time.)

Whew!! I hope I explained that clearly. In my mining adventures, I have tried to explain this to other miners, but they don't believe me and tell me that is produces less ingots. I have never heard of another person doing
>this. Not one!! But it really works.


Wow, I guess I will have to try that and see how it works. THANKS!!!

NEXT!


From: "Paladin"
To: Save Address
Subject: pacman
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 16:05:33 -0400

What he said is nothing original. It's worked that way since skill locks went in, it just works better after UO:R. In fact, on UOPG there was info about it at one time


I didn't know about this since I haven't Powergamed UO until a few months ago (when I started reading UOPowergamers) and I was just recognizing that he was right.

Please keep the information flowing. I love being informed and don't mind being corrected. :)

Well, that's it for now. Have a great evening and wish me luck in my new Martial Arts school tonight.

KIYAA!

•Bites Tongue

Ok, I always give props to people that do something cool and right.

PacMan, this one is for you.

My Treasure Hunter (Clyde; Loren's "older brother") has been stuck at 60 Str for a LONG time. It's been a pain in the ass because he would never survive in Dungeons for long. Clyde is designed as a Treasure Hunter/Lockpicker/GM Mage. His role other than Treasure Hunter is going to dungeons as mage support and open chests as we "crawl" through them. Well, with 60 strength, he would suck at it. He's also at skill cap (700) and I didn't know what to do. I thought about what PacMan had posted in the Forum about gaining stats and decided to try it out.

I locked all my skills and marked mining up and herding down. I mined until 10. Then I reversed the arrows and herded until 10. Then I reversed the process. What happened? I gained 21 points of Str, 3 points of Dex, and one point of Int. The Dex points were disappointing but 21 points of Str with an extra point to Int? Fuck yeah!!! That rocks. Well, I know what to do now to max out the skills. And he's right, it only works with skills capped or locked.

Later I will be trying out dex gains to see how that works for my dex monkeys.

Ok, PacMan, you can give yourself props in the Forum cause that's all you are getting from me. You definately knew what you were talking about.

Adios.

•What a load of bull cookies.

I just read the UO II preview and interview, and there's some twisted logic that DS (some guy - don't ask me who, because I don't know myself) uses in his answers. The excuse for not having anything cool in the game (housing, guilds, etc) is because they want it as bug-free as possible. So that begs the question: why not make a complete game for once then ship it. Oh yeah, money. Bleh. There isn't much there except that boats are now canned and since housing is canned, player vendors are also canned. But they're going to release them "after" it ships. And they're going to release factions "after" it ships too. And everything else. Bah. What a load of bull cookies (I love that word).

According to the preview, UO II is scheduled to come out in March of next year. The excellent features will include: a lame 3D engine; lame graphics; the same lame chat box that EQ uses; monster-bashing; trade-skills; two lands, like in UO:R, so you can get unlimited gold within 5 hours, minimum; skill trees. Um, that's it. Meh. It was all hype when they first announced it. It may be bug-free (if it's not, then they truly do suck more than anyone else. Currently, it's a tie between them and Activision for releasing Dark Reign), but it isn't going to have shit. Anyone who buys it and pays monthly for it is a moron. Five periods. Watts will buy it though. So will Ian.

On the good side, the little interest and hope that I had in UO II is gone, thus I'm never going to update about it again - unless they decide to put everything in, which won't happen. Hooray! One subject that has nothing to do with the topic of this site is gone. If Evilseed decides to set up my domain, they will all be gone. Spam his e-mail if you don't like me clugging up my own site with bullshit that nobody cares about (including me).

In other news, there is none. Har.

•B u l l s h i t .

Well, Blizzard decided to update their Diablo II features page with the system requirements. Singleplayer and multiplayer installation is 1.5 GB minimum afterall. That's insane. All of the shit on my computer (programs, games, porn, etc) takes up 1.9 GB's. This game alone takes 1.5? Wtf is up with that? Beh. I only have a 3 GB hardrive (side note: next time I buy a computer, remind me to look at the, um, details first), and that's not enough. Fuck me.

•Awesome movies.

Well, I watched the WC III and B&W movies, and they're excellent. The B&W movie is like a movie preview that you see on TV commercials. It shows some spells, quests, fighting, interacting, zooming, etc. The Warcraft III movie isn't one that you can actually play, but it shows people playing. They both look great, and are well worth the 501.27 hours it takes to download them.

In other news, Jinx has an interview up with Calandryll that you can find here. It's pointless but funny. Only Jinx....... On the good side, Jinx's board is more empty than mine. Wow. We don't suck so bad afterall.

•Interim Update on Tailoring

I haven't quite finished up GMing Tailoring yet, but I think I've got enough information to post.

Up to 30 base skill - might as well buy this much.
30 base (say 40 displayed) to 52 - Cloaks
52 to 58 - Leather Gloves
58 to 63 - Leather Brassiere
63 to 67 - Leather Shorts
67 to 74.6 - Leather Leggings
74.6 to 86 - Oil Cloth
86 to 91.2 - Oil Cloth and Studded Sleeves
91.2 to 95.4 - Studded Leggings (some Oil Cloth)
95.4 to 100 - Studded Tunic

Mixing in different items definitely helps. At 95 I'm still making the odd Oil Cloth, especially out of burst hour. During burst, always make the most difficult item possible.

Oil Cloth - You're going to end up with a lot of these. Oil Cloth is used to remove poison from a poisoned weapon, to prevent corrosion. You probably won't be able to sell all you make (unless assassin characters suddenly become the No. 1 character template), so it's useful to know you can recycle them into regular bandaids. Good deal for gain, though

Resources - To 52, maybe 30-40 bolts. From 52 to 75, 10,000 - 12,000 hides. From 75 to 92, 35-40 bolts and 5,000 hides. From 92 to GM, I'm not sure yet. After 92, you really chew through the hides, so get ready to kill a lot of llamas. Probably 10,000 - 15,000 hides if my current rate holds. I've been recycling instead of selling what I make, so figure at least 1/3 more if you sell.

At least on Baja and Chesapeake, Moonglow is currently the best location to harvest hides. Orc Valley (aka Goat Valley, the Y Valley, Headless Valley) SE of Yew runs a close second. While I was kicking around Moonglow, I heard a few conversations about leather and studded - specifically PVPers looking for it and not being able to find any. Some guy was walking around selling studded sets at 2k, about twice what it used to go for (and much more than what I used to sell a heavy archer suit for). However much you end up charging, there should be a solid demand for leather until more GM tailors crop up.

Update to update - I just read Redrum's ProQuo post, and I've got a couple of things to add...

Anatomy - You might be able to GM Anatomy off the animal spawn around Moonglow, but good fucking luck. I've been harvesting hides with 2 characters on Baja, one with 94.7 Anatomy, one with 96.8. After a week and a half and over 10000 hides each, I've gained a total of .1 on the higher character and .3 on the lower. Using a Bob character on Chesapeake for the same thing, I still get some burst hour gains at 93, but none outside of that. When wack on BKs, I gain like crazy. Long story short, I think Anatomy gains off of animals tops out somewhere around 95.

Oil Cloths - Might take you to GM, but veeerry sloooowly. I stopped doing only Oil Cloth after a 0.4 burst hour... typically I'm still getting 1-1.5/burst working leather. I'd suggest a mix of Oil Cloth and studded if you want to GM cheaper and faster.

•TheProQuo is my information center.

Got quite a bit of submissions today.

Mage Vs Mage Tip
With the mindblast strategy catching on, its a good idea for mages to start carrying Greater Agility. When a mage starts the Mindblast Combo with a Clumsy (if good) or just hits with a mindblast, down one and the mindblast will do less damage.

Mage Vs Warriors
The Mindblast strategy is unbeatable against a warrior. Here is what a mage should do in this battle. Before battle cast Protection and get a horse. Cast Harm (reflect breaker), feeblemind (Mindblast damage increaser and healing skill decreases), poison (block those blue healers and stop that healing skill) Mindblast, Mindblast, poison, Mindblast. The warrior will be dead as he wont be able to interrupt (protection) and the mage should have plenty of mana left for heals, recalls, and paralyzes.

Warriors only way to try to lesson the damage on mindblast is those magic fish. Magic fish increase intelligence a measly 5 points and the feeblemind should take away more then that. Warriors chances all depend on the number of Greater Cures and Heals that they have. If he can survive long enough to OUTRUN the mage, then he has a chance.

Weird that people are proclaiming the end of magery (like myself) only to have a new strategy wipe warriors faster, harder, and with less mana then before.

Warrior Vs Warrior
Since everyone is GM parry, Tactics, Weapon, and Anatomy now, these battles take forever. Many times it all goes down to the random rolls of damage the game gives people. For an advantage, Drink those Greater Agility and Strength potions. Carry 5-10 Nightshade and try to cast poison on their ass.

If your opponent throws on a bow, equip shield. If they throw on a hally/War Hammer/Spear, take off shield and be ready to drink that Greater Heal. If they charge you with a shield and weapon, step away and cast that poison. Then you charge in with a shield and weapon. Whoever has the highest healing wins.

Resist
Mindblast gives good resist gains. I have been teaching some of my lamer guildmates PvP and letting them own my 6xGM dexer. Every other mindblast they hit me with, I gain. I'm at 80 resist.

Anatomy
Go kill every animal you see in Moonglow woods south of bank.

Magery
Gaining .4 - .5 every day in magery. Today I reached 99.0 by
getting on a boat and attempting to summon every elemental in a row.

Money
Go to Care Bear shard. If you die, follow these steps.
1) delete UO.
2) turn off computer
3) Hang yourself.
You don't belong in the game. Now that NOTHING blocks you but walls, there is no excuse. You can run thru an army of Bone Knights and drag them away 2 by 2. My girlfriend took her new character to Liches. Her skills are the following: 50 resist, 50 magery, 90 tactics, 90 mace, 60 anatomy and 40 healing. She brought a horse and a silver mace. Not silver power, or silver might.......just silver. She left 2 hours later with 25k in bank. That's excellent for a character with shit for skills.

If you don't have silver, go to Hyloth UPPER levels and kill Orc Lords. Every other one has 600-800 gold.

Side note, from yours truly: what did I say about risk vs. reward when the -PK lands were announced? Of course, when someone (Kalar, I believe) mentioned it, Sunsword said something along the lines of: "There will be high risk vs. reward in the -PK lands." Everyone else followed suit and said literally the same thing. Bah. If they planned on making it happen, it didn't work.

Boat owners in -PK lands
You can't Reveal hidden people, you can't tell if someone is hidden when you walk over them. If you do manage to reveal, you can't kill them. This has made Trammel (new lands) Boat Thief Heaven. If they get on your boat, they aren't getting off. They can't steal key but they can loot the hold and take your boat out to the middle of Egypt.

Tailoring
From 73.6 to GM, you can just make oil cloths. 1 cloth per and cloth is cheap. Cheaper and easier to get than tons of leather.

Huge thanks (again) to TheProQuo for this information.

•Axe to the head

I was perusing the Counselor's Message board on Stratics when I came across this:

OK, let's use a Large Battle Axe for example:
The base damage for a large battle axe is 6-38 points of damage.
Exceptional weapons receive about a 3 point bonus to this, bringing us to 9-41 points for base damage.
GM Tactics increases base damage by 50%, adding 4.5-20.5 points. Now the damage is 11.5-61.5.
100 STR will add another 20%, or 1.8-8.2, giving us 13.3-69.7.
GM Anatomy also adds 20% (1.8-8.2) so we are up to 15.1-77.9 points.
And finally, GM Lumberjacking gives a 35% bonus, 3.15-14.8. This gives a grand total of 18.25-92.7 points of damage!
And yes, the concussion blow is applicable, so if your opponant survives the first blow or two, they may be facing you with only half their inteligence as well.

Antonello,
Sonoma.

Wow, this is absolutely amazing. My lumberjacker is going to be so HAPPY! He's already got 47 lumberjacking from just fighting. (Cutting trees is SO boring.) I just fight and I gain .1 every other monster I fight. Hell, I was still gaining off cows. He's now at 100str and I just need to work his dex. Looks like I will be using the Hiding/Archery/Music combination of skills (up to 10 on one, mark it down, up to 10 on another) to gain dexterity. At 45 dex, he just plain sucks with any sort of real weapon. When he hits with his Double axe of Force, it just rocks most monsters. The problem is actually getting a hit in before I have to run off and heal. :/

Warhammers are just rocking everyone's mind. People are calling for it to be nerfed asap. I think they should leave it alone. Well, I am biased. I have a Macer who's near GM and I plan on making him my main PvPer. And doing 90 points of damage on a double damage hit is too good to pass up. Fencing Dexers be damned. Hell, he's got like 4-5 war hammers of Power and I figure I could surprise some folks by casting a mage combo initially, then arming the war hammer (thus canceling the spell) when the dexer runs in with his spear. Wham, 80 life, 1/2 stamina gone. Wham, dead. Enough said. Ditto on the dex problems tho. Gawd I hate character development. :( Give me TEST CENTER stat settings PA-LEASE!

Anyway, look for me to start talking PvP in the future once my macer's healing is above 60 and his macing is GMed.

I will have stories posted in the Stories section now. ::wubs his hands eyeing Redrum's ruler:: Redrum pushed all of us updaters to write our little "adventures" there so I won't get top billing anymore (I love my adoring fans. MUHUHAHAHA!). Sorry. Humble Setting=On. Ego=Off.

It's ok...I will do something to keep you guys entertained.

HEY! Send me EMAIL about your adventures and experiences in UO. I want to pull out some for this week's Letter of The Week!

On another note: I wish Ian would've stayed in the game. Sucks seeing a talented writer and player leaving. We will miss you man. Hope you come back soon.

Outie!

•Smithing Difficulty

Stratics just put up in their smithing section the new difficulties for smithing items, post UO:R. As far as selling smithed items to people, I've found the best way so far is to no longer sell suits but to let people mix and match the parts they want. If you can set up next to a leather armor vendor, so much the better. The only suits that sell are leather ones that don't affect your Dex. Weapons that are currently selling, at least on ATL, are warhammers, kats, kryss, short spear, and halberd.

On another note, we seem to be losing a lot of players from UO lately, several of my fellow updaters, in fact. I hope this isn't an overall trend, but it probably is. Maybe the folks at OSI will get their butts in gear und make some changes to get things back in line.
Or not, but hey, I'm an idealist.

•Woooo!

Stole this from here:

Subject: Battle.net Diablo II Stress Test Update
From: GFraizer
Host: Blizzard Entertainment
Date: Tue May 16 17:50:22

More than 250,000 gamers signed up for the Diablo II Battle.net
stress test. The stress test beta is currently in testing, and we
hope to have a final, downloadable version in the next few days.
Once the beta is ready, we will begin emailing the first round of
download access codes to testers. Testers will be directed to a
ZDNet URL that contains the download. Please remember that we
are sending out access codes in waves, so if you do not receive a
code the first day, you may receive one in a later round. We
will post on www.battle.net when we have sent out the last of the
codes.

Please also remember that if you do not receive an access code,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE BETA. You will not be able to play.

Groovy. 250,000 people signed up and 100,000 people get picked. That means there's exactly a 40% chance of getting in (fear the math genius). That's a decent chance. I don't care if I get in so much though. It would be cool, but it's only 3 quests and a barbarian (I hate warriors). I want to be the necromancer. If that was the case, I would cry on hours end if I didn't get in. Anyway, it's good to know that the ball is finally rolling. The faster the stress beta starts - the faster the game ships - the faster I get to stay up for 1 week in a row playing it.

In somewhat related news, there will be no |_33t |-|4x()rZ in Diablo II. As said here, your character can only have the names with the following extensions: A-Z, one - and one _. HahaHA. No more names like this. It's about time. Anyone who uses a name with them stupid extensions is a fucking retard anyway. They master in banning people and spamming channels. But they actually think they're cool - that's what gets me the most.

•The ONE day I don't keep up with general gaming news, a bunch of shit happens.

Belgh. I must have bad luck.

First up, there's a 42 MB Black & White gameplay movie that you can find here. In bad B&W news, EA is publishing it. Their new official site is http://www.blackandwhite.ea.com/. On the bright side, though, EA is just more or less a subsidiary for Lionhead Studios (company name) - not an actual company of EA, like Origin. This is believed based on the fact that Lionhead is not listed on the EA Official Site, but Origin is. So I don't think EA has a say in anything or that it has to be released tomorrow - even if it's not even near finished. If EA has a say, then Lionhead blows and I'm not going to buy B&W.

Second, there's a 33 MB Warcraft III movie that you can find here. According to Warcraft III.Net, you actually get to play on this one. Sweet.

I haven't watched either movie yet, so I can't say if they're good. They probably are. Mainly because I say so.

Lastly, there's some new UO II screenshots, models and concept art that you can find here. I still have yet to see the "unbelievable graphics and visuals" that Ubiq says there is. To me, it looks pretty bland compared to the other 3D games.

•Kal Ort Por

My time in UO is at it's end. I tried to find things I like about it and I just can't do it. When I get an ICQ to go in the game I cringe. Leave me the fuck alone I'm downloading Eminem off of Napster. Anyway If you want to become a legend, break out your wallets and Click here. By the way Rum, I posted here to add some wit, humour, and insight into the game we played. Sorry that was lost on you.I'm out.

•What's that I smell? Oh yes, a site that's totally off-topic.

Well, this site takes it turns sometimes. We went from powergaming to ranting to off-topic updates to story-telling. This site keeps loses it's main focus: information, but I'm here to save the day (hoorah!). If you like stories, then go to the new stories section (nothing there at the moment) - the updaters will tell their stories there. Once Evilseed decides to setup my world-wide dominat... err, network, I will get my off-topic ass out of here too. The site will be focused solely on UO powergaming information; mixed with a tiny dash of rantings/commentary/whatever the hell else the updaters update about.

Note to updaters: read your e-mail. I sent all of the information you need to know there.

•Attack of the undead mules!

It's inevitable. Every time I work a craftsman up to GM, I always end up feeling like quitting UO. AngryBob recently posted some Scientology links on the Bob site, and looking through them I ran into a general discussion on mind control techniques. The part that caught my attention was how endlessly repeating menial tasks can induce a suggestible, trance-like state. Now, I'm not suggesting that OSI is trying to turn us all into some zonky UO zombie-army. No, I'm not suggesting that at all...

'Scuse me... time to drop another 300 hides in my pack.

•EEK! A spider! Step on it!

Loren went to the Terathans with 4 of my friends. 2 mages (Baron and EZ), and an archer (Talgic) in training joined Loren. 3 of us ran straight for the "safe" spot near the fort so I can bring the Avengers over to us to beat up on. When I realized we were missing someone (EZ), I called out on mass message where she was. She said that when she gated in a Matriarch was there so she recalled out. :/ I went and checked on the area and sure enough, Ol' Masta Matty was there...along with an Avenger. Not good. I pulled them away and told her to come in.

Little did I know all hell was about to break loose. I got Baron and Talgic on the hill while I got ready to do my job as "runner". I seem to always get that job. Maybe it's because my computer is faster and I am on ADSL (ok, I love bragging about it :p). Well, these 2 Avengers decided to pathfind up and trap Baron and Talgic on the hill. Baron got hit once, poison, then I saw him die. I tried to cast cure then, greater heal, but I was too late. :/

If you know Baron, this is normal. He always dies at least ONCE when we go out with him. I told him before we left he's not allowed to die this time. He didn't listen. Baron will NOT use macros and uses the spellbook icons to cast spells. His thing is, if it's on the keyboard, I don't want to touch it. Give him a mouse and he's happy. At least that's what I think. Anyway, he's one of the coolest people in the game I know. He will ALWAYS be there for you if he can. That's friendship. He's one of 2 people I met the first month I started playing that I still hang out with.

Talgic got away alive and was pinging the Avenger as much as he could. Ez was just coming in and told Baron to get to her so she could res him. I got the avengers off the hill to give him the opportunity to get his items. Thank goodness his horse didn't die (it was white; 'Nuff said).

I ran around trying to keep the Avengers and Matriarchs coming but these Provokers kept taking them. dammit. :/ I asked them a couple of times to let us have some. Problem was, they were Provoking the Avengers that were chasing them onto Avengers I was trying to lure. It was either that or they get caught and die. I didn't blame them that much, but I wasn't happy either way. We managed to kill many many Avengers, a few warriors and a handful of Matriarchs. Seems to me there are more Avengers around than TWarriors these days. I did manage to pull a magic xbow from a Avenger. Warriors had dick on them. Well, 200+ gold. But that doesn't count when you are hoping for Magic weapons. I stopped hoping now. They really did nerf the magic weapons on TWarriors. Good for the game, bad for my shopping. ::shrugs:: In the end we all walked away with 1 casualty, they got a shit load of karma (fucking party system sucks for karma gains when your the highest karma wise at Illustrious), and we all got 2.5k each. Not bad for an hour's worth of work :).

Something of note: I found 4 magical items on Lich Lords this weekend. One was a xbow of might (with some archery bonuses) and a war hammer of force. Not bad. The other 2 were junkie armor pieces so I ditched em. The frequency I got magical items off the Lords was higher than anything else in the game so far. Just do me a favor when you go hunting Lich Lords? Let Loren kill some, ok? She will pass the gold off to you. She really really wants Glorious Lady. Thanks, I appreciate it.

•Armor section done.

You can find it here. It's basically just what armor is the best to wear.

In other news, Dr. TwisTer is a moron. There's something called making a test page, then uploading it when the changes are made. At least he was smart enough to copy/paste the same thing over and over while misspelling "several" over and over. Bah. Retard.

•Watts hugged a guy.

I was checking out Lum's, and found an interview with Azile at RPG Zone. Here's the only good part of the interview:

Azile - I am 100% male.

Now that is funny. When UO Terror first came out, Watts said, and I quote: "hugs to Azile for the link". What a gayrod. He will tell you that he didn't know, but he's lying. He knew.

In news that someone might actually care about, since I seem to talking about Diablows 2™ a lot, the newly frequently annoying question is: "is there going to be a Diablo II powergamers?" (it beats "what shard are you from" at least). The answer is yes. I've actually been working on it for quite some time now. But nobody will see it until it's finished - which will probably be a few months or years (depends how much of my life I waste playing it) after the release - so don't expect it any time soon (hence why I never mentioned it before).

•I'm playing O again.

Well, I was bored and missed it so I decided to play Diablo (bet you thought the O was for UO misspelled, but it was actually Diablo. Very clever on my part, indeed). I forgot how fun that game is on multiplayer. Me and Exwhyze (ex-updater that you loved so much that you all complained about him) played on a private game for 9 hours straight yesterday and only got halfway through the Catacombs (second dungeon). That game is hard with only 2 people. We died about 50000 times (this is not an exaggeration), made a total of 3k and have shitty items/spells and can never afford/find any better ones. This is on normal (easiest) difficulty. But that's what makes it fun.

When you're as smart as us (us = him. I'm the idiot that got us killed all the time and asked for money everytime we went to town), there's some cool shit you can do that I never knew of when I played. Those are: permanent portals (the only way a portal closes is if the owner walks in and out, so we both made portals and had eachother walk through the other persons portal); use the ground as our bank (drop gold on the ground so we never lose it. Kick ourselves 5 times if we both got kicked out of the game at the same time, because if that was to happen the gold would dissapear); diversions (when there's 50 monsters, one (him, since I'm the l33t mage and he's the cross-dressing rogue) of us would go down and get killed purposely. Meanwhile, the other fire walls the whole place). We died about 99% of the time from diversions since there's monsters up the ass, but that was the most fun. Diversions own. The only reason I liked Warcraft II so much was because of the diversions (IE: get a couple of units to distract the enemy while you bring in 50 demolition men to blow up all of their shit. WC III better have demolition men, or I'm going to blow up Blizzard).

I think they beefed up the monster speed since I last played 8 centuries ago, because them goat things were fucking flying as fast as them things in the Caves that have huge horns coming out of their noses do. Not to mention that they never die. Either that or we're just newbies. Probably the latter.

Anyway, if you didn't play it in years, you might like it if you're not a cheater. This is the first game that I played in a long time where I actually die a lot, have to create diversions and don't have unlimited gold or the best items. It's just too bad it got hacked so bad. If it didn't, it would probably be fun to play on public games with others, and not everyone would have every item/stat in the game. Maybe Diablo II won't be so bad without PK'ing - if it's hard and doesn't get hacked (if it does, I'm going to cry). Eventually, people will come around and stay to fight. Or everyone will just steal kills and act nice so people invite them into parties and loot party members when they die. Anything to piss people off without dying. Since Diablo II is going to have assloads of people (if I remember correctly, Diablo I made more money off the retail box than any MMOG did from the box and monthly fees. That's a lot of people and money. I'm sure 2 will be much of the same), it's going to be full of fuckheads that do just that, and there's nothing you can do about them - except play on a private game (bleh) or ask them to fight you while they call you a fag 20 times in a row and don't accept (double bleh).

In other news, I was wrong about the past Warcraft III screenshots. None of the units are demons. According to everyone, the demons or the other race have not been shown yet and are still in development. That's pretty much it for WC III. There's 37 sites that cover Warcraft III from E3, but they all say the same damn thing - except that now we know that the demon hasn't been shown. Who knows what the hell them non-orc, human or undead-looking things in the screenshots are then. Must be the orcs of a new generation. Maybe we'll get some guns, tanks and factories too.

Also, thanks for the information on leather armor. I'll update the page after I play Diablows™ for 12 hours. I'm addicted again.

Finally, in regards to Ian's latest post, I have absolutely no idea what the hell that has to do with the old times in UO. Bleh. But while we're on the topic of WTF, Man?, this is better:

Question:

----- Original Message -----
From: Tyler Gill
To: ron@wtfman.com
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2000 6:14 PM
Subject: Flash

What program do you use to make the Flash animations and where could I get it? I'm making a website and would like to have some of the links and stuff being shockwave.

Thanks,
Tyler

Response:

What game do you get those UO screenshots from? I'm making a website and would like to have some UO screenshots, but am not sure which game to get the pictures from.

Thanks,
- Ron

Ron r0x0rz.

•Bored? Think about this for a few days

Well congratulations you just waited 4.5 hours for this page to load to hear my worthless jarble. Aren't you lucky. Haven't played yet today although I think I'll go gm parry with my townie in a few moments. I was surfing through what used to be my favorite site and more specifically this section, basically reminiscing the good old times of UO. Anyway, I came across this little bit of info that I couldn't go without posting.(No, I'm not above ganking material from other websites as I see fit):


Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both Presidents were shot in the head.

Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln.

Both were assassinated by Southerners.

Both were succeeded by Southerners.
Both successors to the presidency were named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their three names.
Both names are comprised of fifteen letters.

Lincoln was shot at the theater named "Kennedy."
Kennedy was shot in a car called "Lincoln."

Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.
Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was with friends in Monroe, Maryland.
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe

By the way. U-571 was a damn good movie. Go see it now.

•I can't think of a title for this post.

If this site is slow as hell today, yesterday and everyday before that, don't worry about it. Someone over at UO Guilds tripped on a cord. Or decided that it would be fun to take the main router down. Either way, there's nothing I can do about it, so send the hatemails elsewhere.

Lastly, if someone calls you wanting you to buy one of their shitty products, say you don't speak english IN english, laugh for a few seconds so they can hear you, and hang up. They'll get pissed and never call again. It's a plus for both parties.

•Happy mothers day.

Today is a very special day. So special that I'm going to sit around doing nothing, as always. Anyway, happy mothers day.

In other news, if you have a GM tailor on your main shard and don't mind testing something, e-mail me with the answers to the following questions:

a.) What is the AR for a full set of brand new, exceptionally crafted leather armor?

b.) Can females wear male leather armor?

I think the answer to B is yes, but I haven't used leather armor, um, ever. If the answer to B is no, what is the AR for a set of female leather armor?

I'm making an armor section (what armor is best to wear), and that's all that I need to know. I would have someone I know test it, but nobody has a tailor on their home shard and Test Center is a piece of shit that's been down for 18 hours. No wonder why nothing gets tested - the damn thing is never up. Never was. Never will be. Anyway, if you could test it, I'll give you not one but two brownies. Hoo boy! Better send that e-mail fast!

Lastly, I just read Nieves update about Azaroth ranking us really low. The thing is, he ranked ranting sites. The site is called UO Powergamers and has sections of information, but we're mistaken for a rant site? We do rant and have opinions, yes, but the focal point of the site is for information. It's not the first time it happened though. The same deal is here. What can I say? People are just generally fucking stupid. There should be some kind of IQ test required before you can get the internet. That would solve the situation greatly.

•Movies, Music, and UO

Ok for starters Gladiator was a fairly decent movie. Worth the 5 bones. The opening scenes were epic. In music news this guy is getting alot of well deserved controversy. All I can say is blame the city we're from. Even though he takes ignorance to a level previously unattained. I will be one of the first people buying his album May 23. It's like a long hip-hop stand up comedy act. Can you say quintuple platinum? Music just plain sucks right now. I think Tupac would have been able to put a nice ballad together with Slim had this unfortunate incident not happened.

Allright I know..."powergamers" yada yada yada... Had an interesting night tonight. I basically hung around Delucia only to be subjected to countless people who have grasped onto the concept that you just don't have to do a whole lot to play a townie and hold your own even with the likes of yours truly. Ok well only one story is worth telling really. My ace boon Nacho and I were at orc fort walking around flagged grey waiting for some unfortunate souls to attack us. It didn't take to long and before you know it, we're overloaded with loot from people who really should be playing in trammell. At any rate one of these "hardasses" takes things a bit personal and then begs for me to war him.. calls me a newbie.. you know.. the basic shit talking from your basic ignoramus. At this point he has about 4 of his boyfriends standing around throwing in their taunts. I finally say fine. If it will make you happier for me to kill you I will happily ablige. So... we get out of town just him and I. He flags at my request since his "posse" was a few screens down and we start to get down. Basically the fight went like this for the first minute. I would clumsy/mindblast/poison and he would use his t1 and run off screen. All I did was med and ask him why he challenged me to a duel if all he wanted to do was run like a prison bitch. I could see this wasn't going anywhere so I decided to make him think he was getting the better of me. I let him get my hps to about 45. Now why people stop to say.."I'M OWNING YOU" I will never know, but that's exactly what this moron does. So with my hps low he gets happy and I lock explode/explode and cast mindblast and he's off to the races again. Luckily my dsl conex didn't let me down and I caught up with this coward right before he healed. Dead. Owned. So.. I loot his corpse and he runs off OOooOOing. I should have been more wise. Seeing as how schoolgirls usually travel in packs, I should have seen this coming. Apparently the guy I killed doesn't die much because they were all pretty upset to see that I had just handed their fearless leaders ass to him. So... I got banged like a skinny white child molestor his first day at San Quentin.(yes I gave counts) From then on the night deteriorated into worthless smack being spouted off by everyone. All pretty lame really. Still had a good time messing with the rainbow parade marchers whose names were Lecktric, Ghostface, and Romeo. Thanks guys, I had fun handing each one of your asses to you several times. It's hard work making me look that good. It is appreciated. click this to laugh I need sleep.

•No more mule updates! Yaaaaaay!

This is the last part of my updates on money mules, so if I've missed any of your favorites, too damn bad. It's Saturday night and I must drink beer and stare at women.

Reg vendors - Running a profitable reg vendor depends on 2 things, location and the amount of time you are willing to spend buying regs and restocking the vendor. It's definitely the easiest type of vendor to set up with low skills. Good locations are high-traffic areas a)anywhere far from magic shops, b)somewhere close to dungeons or anywhere people die a lot, or c)close to a busy (sold-out) NPC magic shop. The first two locations are obvious and let you really jack up the reg prices (say, 2-2.5gp above NPC cost, maybe more depending on location). With the third location, you're relying not only on other people's laziness, but also on their frustration with reg shopping. You'd want to go for steady volume business here, so jacking up the reg prices too high won't work (try 1-1.5gp above NPC cost). After you start getting repeat customers, it all becomes a matter of how often you are willing to make reg runs and how many times a day you can log in and restock the vendor. Do I need to tell you this part can get pretty tedious? Under UO:R, you're also going to have to decide between selling to training players on Trammel and the established players on Felucca... who will end up buying more, I don't know.

Alchemy, Poisoning - It's entirely possible to make money off a non-GM alchemy mule. With all the AR/Dex/Stamina loss changes, the inability to heal while poisoned, etc., now more than ever it's good to have a few potions handy. And Poisoning... with the inability to heal while poisoned, a lesser poison might as well be as good as a deadly poison if you make your opponent miss a heal. I haven't personally checked on the durability of poisoned weapons after the patch, but if the reports I heard from TC are still accurate, there should be increasing demand for longer-lasting GP'd and P'd weapons (and possibly demand for throw-away DP'd daggers and skinning knives), so it should be easier to run a poisoned weapon vendor at lower skill levels.

Fletching - You can also make money with this skill at non-GM levels. Aside from selling arrows & bolts, you can also sell the exceptional bows you churn out quite happily at 50 skill. Since Archery is back under UO:R, you can sell these things like popcorn. Only popcorn lasts longer.

Inscription - With the Magery/Inscription changes, expect a flood of new scroll vendors (which is good, because I usually only know of 1-2 vendors per shard that carry all 8 circles) although Recall, Gate, and Resurrection are the only ones that consistently sell. Full Trammel rune books are also popular, at about the same price as a full spell book,

Tailoring, Carpentry, Tinkering - I basically look at these as add-ons to a good Smith mule. With q-staffs no longer dealing stamina loss or armour damage, there isn't a lot you can make with Carpentry that consistently sells on vendors. Furniture and house add-ons will probably be profitable for a while after housing is reactivated, but how many wooden thrones can you actually sell? And with so many people working Lumberjacking, look forward to a plague of carpenters on the land.

The only reason I make any money with Tinkering is because somehow my shop was "discovered" by a t-hunter guild (ie - "luck"). I make some coin off of lockpicks and lockpicking skill kits, but when I price things out by how much profit I get per ingot, Smithing still comes out way ahead. BTW, The biggest disappointment for Tinkers under UO:R are traps. According to OSI, the changes were brought in to make trap boxes more useful to "merchants"? Like hell. As it stands, you activate the trap when you lock a trap box with the key. From then on, the only way to set the trap off is to use a lockpick on the box. Now lets say you take your ATS with you while mining, so you can store your ingots. Along comes dread GM Minerkiller A, he kills you and loots your stuff. First of all, he isn't going to have a whole lot of trouble getting into the trap box, since you need to keep the key on your person to be able to get into it yourself... Let's say you manage to swallow the key, or otherwise make it magically disappear up your ass (you can't, but humor me). Minerkiller A still takes your box and your stuff is just as gone. The only way to use a trap box to "guard your valuables" is to lock it and leave the key at one location (bank, house), then go straight to the second location and a second key (bank, house). The contents will be WELL-PROTECTED for the half second it takes to Recall.

The only useful part to Tinkering under UO:R is that PKing people with trap boxes is back, in a very limited way. Basically, you make and trap a large chest, and head to a dungeon that's popular with people training lockpicking. Hide in a room that spawns chests, then leave the trap on the floor as though it spawned. Wait until someone comes around and tries to pick the lock, then loot what's left after the earth-shattering kaboom. No counts, no problems. Just bring a book if you try this out of peak hours.

What was I writing about? Oh yeah - miscellaneous mules under UO:R... um, that's about it. I drink beer now.

•Jesus.

I decided to take a stroll to the Diablo II Complainers Forum, and I found this thread. On this post someone asks how big the smallest install will be. Dumbass from Blizzard then replied by saying that singleplayer is 600 MB, multiplayer is 900 and full is 1.5 GB. I hope GFraizer (the dumbass from Blizzard) meant to say that that's the largest install. If so, he needs to learn how to read. If not, then that's fucked up. 1.5 GB for the smallest install? I only have 900 MB left. Do they expect me to delete porn for a game? I don't think so. Much like in real life; where as god, family, blah blah blah comes first - porn comes first in the computer world. If anyone makes a speech about something they did on the computer, the first thank you goes out to porn. Mixing up the order results in failure.

Also, the release date has been delayed somewhat. Somewhat in the terms that everyone thought open beta would last a week and they'd ship it, like we want. It's supposed to arrive in July. Lame. I don't want to wait 2 more months. I want to play it right now. I think waiting 2 or so years is enough time.

On a semi-related note, anyone who needs to use a trainer/hack to beat Diablo singleplayer is a pussy. I just beat it one day without any cheats. That game is so easy - I don't see why people need to cheat. It's amazing how much stuff that's in Diablo is in UO. Half of it even looks the same. And OSI won't release information about UO II; in worries that competetion will steal from them. So it's ok for them to steal from others, but nobody can steal from them. Hrmmmmmmmmm...

•NewsPro stuff.

I added how to use archives on the articles page. Also, since the official site seems to be down, I uploaded NewsPro (just for you, Sirrion). You can find it here. It's only about 40 KB. Should take 20 hours if you have an ISP as shitty as mine. .02 seconds if you have a good one.

•It's Been a While, and then a While.

First, I'd like to apologize for not posting recently, I've just been promoted to a new job with a longer commute and have been putting in some long hours at the new location. I'd like to talk a little about my PvP experiences as a classic mage in the post-patch universe.

Against a warrior with a warhammer and a high dex, you're dead. Forget about it. I've tried every permutation that I can come up with, but unless you have GH precast before he hits you the first time for the inevitable 70+ damage, you're dead. The swing rate on this weapon needs to be adjusted, or at least the frequency of the Thor-smack needs to be reduced. It's just ungodly what that thing does. On the plus side, the 70+ may not disrupt your casting if you have protection cast. Best bet, forget protection and use RA against this guy so you can deflect some damage and try this combo: EXP,EB,Poison,Mind Blast. If they are 100/25/100 and you do this and they manage not to resist your poison, it ought to kill them. It also only uses about 60 mana total, and at 90+ med, you'll have 50 when done with the combo, so you can actually try it twice before running out of mana. Odds are 4:1 against, this is not a good fight for you.

Against one of those anatomy-healing mages w/o tactics, if you are a classic mage, cast reflect and go to town. Assuming you have swords, like a lot of old mages did, the first thing you do is attack with the hally equipped and pray for the concussion blow. This is a good thing. You should do 20-30 damage and now be able to blast him. Remember, poison is king. Cast it to disrupt heals, and to keep him casting cure instead of e-bolt. If the concussion blow went off, you'll win this battle. IF not, his healing gives him an advantage that poison nullifies, and your katana equalizes. Paralyze him if you can, a lot of mages don't carry pouches for some reason, go figure. Odds 2:1 against, with a lot of that based on your opponent's skill.

My suggestion is to convert to a med-warrior, which should be the easiest converstion for this type of character, because you'd be taking up fencing and anatomy, and dropping swords and eval. You could still use swords, but mages are weaker than before so the concussion blow isn't as key as the paralyzing blow. Since you'll have wrestling, you'll also have stunpunch from anatomy+wrestling. Anatomy will raise slower than fencing so you'll have to do something later on to gain dex at the cost of int which you won't need anymore.
This is what I'll be doing with Corwin, so we'll see how it works and I'll let you know.

Next up, the beginnings of my pure mage, Merle, with the new template that uses Magery, Resist, Med, Inscription, Eval, Wrestling, and Anatomy.

•Owned? We think so.

Sorry I haven't posted in the last few days. Exams were tough this semester and I am packing to go to the beach tomorrow so I've been a tad busy.

I've still been in game though. And boy have I had some fun.

The last few days I have come upon the funniest little guild. They hang out somewhere in no man's land and just love to attack me. They absolutely love it!!! Well this is how it all got started.

Tuesday I was just walking along the road working up archery and anatomy when I see this grey body on the road. I, being the kind person I am, decide to take a few things for my own. Well his friend comes out of hiding and says "Dont do that man!!! He was healing me" Well first this person's name was Daemonica. And second she was red. So I continue to loot and she tries to stick her short spear in me. I come back with "Oh no you didn't girlfriend" And proceed to kick her ass with my Kryss of Might and Wooden Shield of Hardening.
I loot her as she is spamming me with her ooooooo's and OOOOOOOO's.

Well now the grey I looted initially starts running upto me and spamming why I attacked his friend. I reply "Because she attacked me genius." Then he starts attacking me and soon he is dead again.

Now the fun began. These two "Newbies" so to speak, call their buddies on ICQ and two reds recall in. They cordially ask me to give them their friends stuff back (these people don't know who they are messing with) and I respond with a simple, yet arrogant, "Hmm Nah." I see an An Ex Por coming from one of their mouths and "your dead newbie" coming from another. The para reflected off me and onto the caster and the warrior who was charging at me got dealt a paralyzing blow from my newly aquired short spear. This was gonna be fun. Now the first red I killed comes back re-equipped and starts attacking me. Galahad can take on two people but not three, so I start hoofing it up the road. These fools are following me. Recalling would have been boring so I am playing with them. Attacking one of em to near death and running. I eventually kill one of em and I get the message your horse is very fatigued. WELL THATS NOT GOOD. I dismount and run. I didn't even care bout the loot. And I am fast, but these fools had horses. And they were hitting me good with arrows and kryss swings. I finally realize that I am soon dead so I recall out.

The next day I pay another visit to them. This time they wax me good. I mean real good. Right when they see my name , and I see the four or five of theirs they run out. I get some good hits in but am killed. I do give them all counts and wish they are in stat loss now. That would be funny. I get some people from EK. to rez me and I ask if they can help. They say they can. So I bum one of their horses, some aids and a long spear and hoof it to these reds' house. I get they out and they start chasing me. When they get pass this small bridge, an EK. mage In Sanct Grav's the escape side and these 4 reds are toast. I get most of my stuff back and just laugh and laugh.

I'll post right when I get back from the beach. Peace.

•Who'da thought RPG Planet would ever come in handy?

Planet Neverwinter has better analysis on NWN. On the front page, there's some nice stuff to know about and some lame stuff. The lame would be: "The game is aimed at the next generation video cards". Bleh. So much for my voodoo 1 card being worth a damn. The nice would be: everything else. They also have 9 new screenshots here. Some are the same from the site on the below update, but they look so much better. I love the view, graphics, interface - pretty much everything. Too bad it's supposed to come out next year.

•News that was supposed to be updated 8 hours ago.

Well, UO Guilds was down for a very long time today. I'm not sure what's up, but it's been happening a lot since I moved here. Right now, Geoshithole doesn't sound too bad. If Geocities sounds good, then something terrible is amongst us.

In other news, finally, some people cover Warcraft III, Black & White and Neverwinter Nights from E3. Fuck the other games, says I.

There's a Warcraft III gameplay movie that you can find here (8.5 MB). It shows an orc vs. human unit battle on a mountain, humans attacking orc buildings in the snow, another orc vs. human unit battle below a small mountain, an orc base, and a couple orc and human heroes in each of the scenes. It's blury and kind of hard to see, so don't expect any in-depth visuals.

There's some interesting Black & White stuff over at The Citadel. Alpha is supposed to start in mid-June, closed beta (no open beta) is supposed to start in the beginning of July and they're shooting for a late-September release date. They also said that you will be able to edit your own stuff in ways. Here's what was said about it:

After release, we're setting up a company called Black & White Limited, and it's going to be doing two things. The first thing is my ambition to make the whole of Black & White, the AI engine, the 3D engine, the physics engine, open-source. Then anybody can download and use that stuff. To use it in a commercial product, you have to pay us a royalty, but, you know, absolutely free for enthusiasts to use. What it'll also be doing is complimenting it with things like world editors, creature editors, script editors. Just allowing the online community to continue building the franchise of Black & White up.

Also, there's 71 B&W screenshots here.

Neverwinter Nights is mildly covered here. There isn't much said, but there are 9 new screenshots to look at. The angle seems a bit high so you might not be able to see clearly. You get the general idea of what it looks like though.

Lum also has some stuff up. Mainly about Anarchy Online and Shadowbane. The Shadowbane preview includes a very nice interview. Unlike most interviews, all of the questions and answers are good. You won't have to skip or fall asleep midway through it. I've pretty much shrugged SB off from day one, but after reading that, it sounds like it has potential. Now if he would just get his ass to the Warcraft III booth for more than 5 minutes...

•Azazel better than us??

This guy decided to rate all the sites on a 1 to 5 scale. Battle Vortex and Azazel got a higher rating than we did. :/

I would really be interested in knowing what kind of rating parameters he used to rank us.

Personally, I think the best sites are: UOPowergamers (of course), Lum's, Adam Ant, UO Something, and koffStraticskoff. Why? Because they do a number of things: they inform, they entertain, and they load quickly. At home I am on ADSL with a possible top speed of 1.4MBits. At work, I am ON the Internet backbone (go ahead, drool, I know you're jealous). When a site takes forever to load, I don't visit you much. Some people could come back with, well, I can get online fast with these sites from my computer. Great, I am happy for you. But if I can't load you quickly, I hit "stop", type in the next URL, and move on. I might miss on some good writing but I hate waiting. And if all you do is say "fuck that, fuck you, suck my penis you penis-sucker", you aren't worth my time either. Makes me think, "ok, what's your point?" Anyone can say fuck shit damn, but SAY something. At least UOTerror does. I read him alot. Not one of my favorite sites. But his rants are hell a funny and sometimes he makes sense. Granted, I use colorful terms in alot of my posts, but hey, it's all within context (I can't wait for the flames now).

I give AznKain 2.5 squirting perverts (out of 5) based on the fact he links us, sometimes has something to say, and loads quickly. Oh, and I was pissed we got a low rating. Call me biased, I don't care. I think UOPowergamers is better. Oh, and I read his whole site before I rated him. Unlike other people. So nah!

And for the RECORD! I can count to 5. I could even tell you the answer for solving x^2+2-1 using the Quadratic Equation. Dammit.

Disclaimer: The opinions of this reviewer does not reflect the opinions of the Powergamers Update Team. (Something else he didn't recognize, there is more than one updater to the Powergamers Team :).)

•UO II stuff.

Well, there's some new UO II stuff over at the official downloads section. There's some screenshots, art and a preview video. I'm downloading the video now so I can't comment on it, but personally, I don't like the way the screenshots look. It doesn't look like there's any "stunning" graphics or visuals as they say. In particular, this screenshot reminds of them console fighting games (Double Dragon, etc). That thing in the middle is supposed to be a lich, but it looks like a fur bathrobe or something. This screenshot is decent though. It's not the graphics or engine that counts (UO is poor, but it was fun), but it's probably going to be rushed. If 4 major aspects (housing, mounts, guilds and quests) of the game are not included, and it's still buggy, then that is just pathetic. Maybe it will be good, but I highly doubt it. If they release it this year, it's going to be rushed and buggy - count on it. We'll just have to wait and see.

•WC III movie and screenshots.

Well, I just watched the new trailer movie at Daily Radar. It was awesome. They should start making real movies - I'd watch 'em.

Also, there's 6 new screenshots on the Official Site. We finally get to see more advanced stuff. The first one shows orc peons gathering gold and some orcish buildings. The second one shows the demon base with some units. The third one shows some units and a building for the undead. The fourth one shows a human mage casting something on a soldier and a dread lord and something else from the undead. The fifth one shows an orcish mage casting what looks to be a shield on a fellow orc. The sixth one shows some orc grunts killing some unwanted critters and water (I love water).

I think the view, interface and graphics all look excellent. It is in 3D, but it's in insometric view (over the top like UO, other Warcraft games, Diablo, etc). I don't understand why other games (EQ, AC, etc) don't do it like this. The graphics look nice and the view is SO much better than 1st person. It's just too bad that it won't come out, say, tomorrow. Oh well. It's definately a game I'm looking forward to. Let's just see if my voodoo 1 card that I never upgraded and am never planning on it because I'm a cheap ass can handle it.

In other news, while checking the referrers for the site, someone came from here. Twisted freaks.

•...and today's updates grow even longer...

This continues my updates on money mules...

OK - Mining is boring as shit. No argument from me on this. Unfortunately, a well placed armour and weapons vendor (plus a reg vendor) is how I make a big part of my reg money. Offhand, I can't think of a more reliable way to take 1-2 hours of resource gathering/week (it helps to smelter those tons of monster spawn weapons), 1-2 hours of making stuff/week, and turn it into +40,000gp/week. A couple of changes under UO:R, though.

Mining for skill is a real waste of time under the new system. Even with moving around and hitting different forges, skill gain from digging is pathetic. On the plus side, you CAN get some very good gain off of smelting ore piece by piece. On the minus side, the easiest way to make mining even more boring than it already is is to (!ding!) smelter ore piece by piece. If you're doing mining/smithing for money, you may want to consider getting your Str up to 100, locking Mining at 69.9 (or 64.9, depending on your smelting successes), then finding a nice quiet cave somewhere on Trammel where you only pull up iron ore. Dig up 15-20k ingots then work Smithing under burst (maybe a month ago I took a character from 80 Smithing to GM on roughly 11k ingots with resmelting, about 1/4-1/3 of which I got from resmelting weapons and armour off of critters). With Trammel open and the fear of dread GM Minerslayers gone, expect to see a LOT of people selling ingots in the near future - this may eventually make pure mining mules less profitable.

Methods of GMing a smith haven't changed... Redrum has a perfectly good method in the Skills section, and the Weapon method from Stratics worked well for me (just remember to throw in some harder items during burst hour). Once you're in a position to set up a vendor, you'll want to give some thought to which world you're going to set up on. With a lot of people migrating to Trammel and all new characters starting there, the number of people running around shops on Felucca is dropping. Specifically, the people who die and lose stuff most often aren't around as much. It's not so bad now, but once (if?) they get housing sorted out and shops start opening up in Carebear Land, it will be interesting to see how well shops in Felucca can survive with a lower player/density ratio.

A more immediate problem is what to do about new armour combos. For a pretty complete look at AR-Dex combos, have a look at this page. About a week ago, I started placing new combos on my vendor, along with two old Light and Heavy Archer suits for comparison. Imagine my surprise when the old combos (with lower AR and higher Dex loss in both cases) were selling out and I couldn't sell any of the new stuff to save my life. The combos were marked with Dex-AR info, but no one was buying. With so many new combos possible, my current solution is to sell armour-by-the-slice (at a slightly higher price, of course) until people figure out what they want. Seems to be working, but it does mean you have to have GM Tailoring if you want to cover all the possible combos (I've done 0-72 after 2 burst hours, will post on final results when I'm done).

Unless you're into running a craftsman, going the GM Smith route CAN be pretty tedious - there's just no inexpensive way to skip mining. On plus side, you end up with a) A basically free source for armour, weapons, and repairs, and b) A reliable, consistent way to make cash, even when you aren't in-game. Choose your poison...

Next: Miscellaneous Mules! Will the excitement ever cease?!?

•A few quick things I need to clarify.

First, the PvM section was not done by me at all - Nieves did it. All that I did was edit it for grammar, etc. If you have suggestions/questions, ask him because I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Second, please check who's the one updating (name and e-mail is by the date) before you toss an e-mail. I'm getting e-mails regarding updates that I didn't even make.

Third, I do not play UO anymore - as said 5000000000 and 1 times already. PLEASE stop asking what shard I'm from or if I'll play with you. This actually ties in with #2 sometimes, because I occasionally get asked if I'll go monster-bashing with people (supposed to be for Nieves, obviously).

I'll still forward them to the proper person, but it would be easier if you check who you want to send a message to beforehand. Remember, I'm not the only one updating anymore, and when I do, it usually has nothing to do with UO.

Thanks,

Your friendly dictator.

•All Kill, and other new macros

I haven't had this much fun since... well last weekend at a place called All Stars, but definately the most fun I've had sitting in front of this hyperglaring cube of pixlized images in a long time. Ok, after not playing much at all, I jumped on a character and found all the old pvp guilds have broken out their townies. Nieves hit on something earlier this week talking about OSI's futile attempts to keep older players in the game by offering the reward program. OSI trust me, if the old pvp characters haven't quit yet, it's because they're waiting on the housing patch to place a keep or tower and sell their accounts. Judging by the number of people that hang out in Trammel, I doubt this will affect the game. I couldn't be happier. Let me tell you, the only thing this patch has done is give players that used to suck a misguided notion that they can even think about stepping to me and mine. It's amazing that people like "Clay of Yew" actually start flexxing on me. It's like they've never heard of me... ermmm well actually... they haven't! Check this out.

I'm at my boy fury's house. That's Furious, not the wannabe "fury" that is running around Chesa. Anyway, I notice someone go into the vendor house right behind his. Well I cast incog and go over.. I notice the vendor saying his name like crazy,(rpers do not read any further) so after considering my sins and that being all smiles, I attack. Well apparently the friend he came with was the owner of the house. Damn ok so I'm banned. I chalk it up to a missed opportunity and go back to chat with Fury. Whilst him and I are talking we start seeing people recall in like every 20 seconds. After sharing a few "rofl's" we notice that there is actually a small army gathered up outside the vendor house. Well I go afk for a few minutes and come back to see Fury out chatting with the throng. Being the sociable creature I am I go out to chat. The conversation is basically about these individuals intolerance for blue pks. After a few *nods* and agreements from myself, they start to get annoyed. At this point there are 6 of them to 2 of us. One of the mages cast reflect and starts summoning a demon, just after I claimed that I was happy to see that my magery had finally reached 75. I say "I think I've got that spell" and cast my own. Fury follows suit. After "Clay" fizzles a few times, fury and I promptly have our demons summoned and guarding us. At this one of the army throng runs in the house. At this point I am soo ready for some action, so showing the testicular fortitude I am blessed with, I cast energy field and promptly place it to block the door of the vendor house where 3 others lay in wait. ALL KILL! Well.. all Hell breaks loose. I get attacked by not 2 but 3 townies, all the while trying to para and eb Clay. I don't expect Fury to take a count but of course he immediately heals me and is grey himself. Well Clay recalls leaving me to concentrate on these 3 townies. I train my demon on one of them and the other 2 are banging the bloody hell out of me. It's all I can do to keep healed and get away. Very disappointed I am ready to go back and start fighting.. I get a q from Fury telling me that he lost connection. In UO translation that means he fucked up and died. :) So rushing back I go back to try and loot my friend even though the odds are against me. I go back to find only 3 people around. Looks like most recalled. At this point I was blue to all but one of the townies so I attacked him. I decide to lead this hopeless cause of a pvper out to the woods a little when I notice I have 1 shade left. (keep in mind my style of fighting a townie is usually 5 consecutive ebolts and a hail mary that they don't resist 3 of them) Well I para, meditate and then smack off asking about how it felt to know that he was about to get looted. At this he let out a "ROFL ya right". Well..7 seconds later I'm looting his corpse after a nice exp,fs,eb combo and now have in my possesion fury's reg bag, not to mention everything the townie had.

All in all not a bad 30 minutes. All this action and not a single instant haly. After all was said and done we fought a 6 on 2 with 1 of us dying and 1 of them dead, although it was not that close. Fury and I definately got the better of them as 3 of them completely red barred but got saved by the karma gods. As long as there is action like that, I will play the game. And you know what? I give credit to all those that fought against us. After the dust settled the owner of the house (female) started using flattery saying how she had never seen someone fight like that yada yada etc.. and just being very, very cool about it. So.. a good bit of fun.. no hurt feelings.. and a good night of UO, worthy of bringing me back to post this.

On a personal note.I told you I would post every now and then. I didn't think it would be this soon though. Here is the deal. My uncle and I decided to open a new business here in San Antonio. It has come to our attention that a prominent member of our guild is not healing others at our other business in my hometown. Therefor I am going to have to jump on a plane and go pk this heretic before there is an uprising amongst our disciples. Once there I will have to loot any corpses I see and share the wealth with my loyal guildmembers.

In lamens terms I'm heading north to take care of a work related situation. I was supposed to go this past week but events have kept me here in the Alamo City until the 22nd. When gone I will be away for an undetermined amount of time. (Basically as long as it takes for me to start getting everything on track.) Could be a week, could be 4 months. Until then, look for a post or 5 that should include yours trulies pvp tactics and guild happenings.

If anyone on the Chesapeake shard thinks they have what it takes to be in my guild, email me your player name and stats. Keep in mind, stats are just one part of the qualifications, being able to effectively talk about an opposing guild members mother is just as, if not more important than the aforementioned.

I leave you with words of wisdom from someone who obviously knows what us guys with ladies that hate the game we play go through: Always remember to point out to your girl that the "stupid fucking kid game" is keeping your ass home at night instead of being out sleeping around with her cousins. That usually gets a girl to bite her tongue ;)

Amen

•Whistle while you work....

I got on with my miner/smith last night. I mined over 650 iron, 50 Shadow, and 40+ dull copper ingots (73 mining skill) and got like .5 total skill gain in mining. :/ Now that sucks. I decided I would mine my smith till he was GM then take all the ingots he got so I would be able to sell off/trade colored ore for iron and get enough iron so I can work smithing full time. If it's going to be like that, it will take me a year to get to GM mining/smith. Dammit. Power hour my ass.

Why is it that people absolutely refuse to go with me to fight Deamons on Fire Island? I mean come on. Where are the hard core PvMers on Great Lakes: Trammel? I got some ideas on what to do to kill off those big bad Deamons. :/ I could go alone, but what's the fun in that? Not too mention the fact that someone else will be watching my ass in case a Dragon decides to spawn in ::grins:: I guess I will just have to suck it up and go alone one day.

I went to the Red Mages with my Katana of Power. Kwan Li had spawned in 3 times (all at once) with Xasomething, and the other Blue Robe dude. You know what it's like to fight 3 blue robes and 5 red robes all at once? Scary as all fucking get out. I could've sworn I was dead. Luckily bandages and heal potions kicked in when I needed them. Oh, and all that fighting was in the first 5 minutes of being there. Thank goodness the katana was wacking the shit out of Kwan Li in 4-5 hits OOHUGH! DEATHMOANS! Hehe. I think I made about 10k in the 2 hours I spent there. Was great. I kept pulling sandles galore and wound up having around 30 pairs pf blues (counting all the trips I have made). I rode around Delucia, Papua, and Moonglow looking for people that had on browns or no shoes and gave them a pair of blues. Made me feel good and I got to get rid of them. ::grins::

What's with the Title changes?? Loren is Illustrious and was getting the message "You have gained ALOT of Karma/Fame" with the blue robes mages and stayed at Illustrious when I logged off last night. GRRR! :( That sucked. Maybe I am just being impatient.

Here are the Titan Spots I promised here and here. On this spot, run to the edge of the top of the hill, then teleport down. On this spot, run to close to the hill and teleport up. On this spot, Joeys will come at you from the backside so be ready for them. On this spot, Titans/Cyclops and Wyverns will come at you from the Northeast and East so be ready for them. I hope that helps.

Happy hunting :).

•Posting 12 hours ahead of time is good.

Daily Radar is going to have a Warcraft III trailer tonight at 6 PM. No idea what time zone though. I'm posting this now because I probably won't be on later. Incase you missed it (like me), GameSpot also has a trailer that's been up for about 25 months now. It's the same trailer that's on Warcraft II: Battle.Net Edition. You can download it here.

•The best things in life are free...

Things you DON'T want to do while playing UO - Keyring bombs (keyrings with 1000+ keys on them) make nifty parting gifts for people who like to loot your body. However, carrying them on a character with a last object/wait for targ/last target keyboard macro just isn't a good idea (translation - Stuck on a boat & unable to commit suicide, I just spent 3 hours picking keys out of my pack. And no one would kill me, damnit!).

Anyhow, since the Money section is down I wanted to post a couple of updates about money mules under UO:R. Even with burst hour gains in Magery reducing the cost in regs, training up a half-decent character can still be pretty expensive. As much as I like bashing monsters for loot, checking in with my vendors and finding 20k-30k every day or so is pretty good too. So first off, let's have a look at everyone's favorite whipping boy, Fishing.

For the totally clueless, Fishing was once one of the best money-making skills to have. Useless for anything other than gaining Str and Dex until you actually GM'd, once you hit 100 you pretty much had it made. You could macro-fish off a moving boat in relative safety for hours on end and come back to a pile of t-maps and SOSs in your pack. You could sell the maps and bottles, or better yet fish/dig them up yourself - this is where the big money came in, selling off those weapons of Power and Vanq.

These days, with maps and bottles come off of sea-serpents you fish up, macroing no longer works (you have to loot the corpse. This is why t-maps and SOSs on vendors are drying up). Worst of all for fishers, OSI has drastically reduced the SOS spawn rate due to the UO:R expansion. Fishing is a lot like mining - only set locations at sea will spawn bottles and maps. Since UO:R doubles the amount of sea, it also doubles the amount of spawn sites. Worried about the same number of Fisherman hitting twice the number of sites, OSI has cut the rate pretty much in half. Now, for practical reasons, the chance of the SOS take ACTUALLY doubling is pretty much non-existent, but hey, it's OSI's game and they do what they want.

I'm not going to suggest anyone start training down Fishing or anything, but you people still planning on GMing should know a couple things. First, the SOS situation can only get worse. There are a fixed number of spawn sites, a shrinking spawn rate, and an increasing number of GM fishers - this means you are going to hit more and more fished-out spots. It's a cheesy way to do things, but this is a sort of control on the number of fishers each shard can support. Too many fishers = too few SOS to go around = more people dropping Fishing (at least in theory). Second, since the spawn has been reduced, it is MUCH harder to come up with a UOAutomap map of SOS sites. A spawn site map is absolutely essential to a fisher with any ambition - you need to concentrate on fishing out sites that you KNOW spawn maps and bottles and avoid dead areas if you want to make a go of it. Naturally, most people aren't too inclined to share these maps.

Personally, I can still get multiple maps/SOS (OK... truthfully maybe 2) per hour by tooling around specific spawn sites. The people this is really going to hurt will be the new fishers, people without the same resources. I've heard horror stories of 5 hours/SOS (but GM Fishers do tend to whine a lot).

T-hunters will suffer simply because fishers are suffering... the main source for lvl 1 t-maps used to be fishing. However, I'm running into more maps on monsters lately, so maybe OSI upped that.

Basically, fishing isn't going to get you rich the way it did 6 months ago, but it's still a relatively safe way to find magic items. For a more interesting ways to use the HALF of the UO map that is the ocean, go check out this guy's site.

Next: Changes to Smithing mules & vendors...

•Half of the PvM section complete.

Well, it's halfway there. The Undead, Large Group, Orcs, Terathans and other (harpies, reaper) are finished. Some is better than none so I uploaded it. You can find it here. The rest will come when I receive it.

Huge thanks to Nieves for creating it. And thanks for using an HTML editor, thus making me dig through the messy code when editing it (just kidding :-) ).

In other news, Vegeta is on vacation for a couple of weeks. If you contact him and he doesn't reply, it's because he's not around - not because he hates you (well, not only because he hates you).

•Part II baybee!

Well, Daily Radar has posted part II of the Warcraft III interview. Not much new to know about at all, except that casting spells will benefit or effect races differently (IE: if you cast a spell on an orc, they would get different benefits from it than the other races would). That's cool. There's also three new screenshots posted. The first one shows what one of the flying things (can't tell what it is) from a race (looks like demons, because it doesn't look like anything else and they won't say what the 5th race is) looks like, archers, a knight and a demon hero (you can tell it's a hero because it looks cool and big). The second one shows a dread lord (the purple thing with wings) and an abomination (the fat one that takes up all the space) - two heros from the undead; a mage, knight and archer from humans. The third one shows humans vs. orcs with three heros (the big ones are the heros). I still can't figure out what the hell the stupid ass frog-looking thing that's in every damn screenshot is though. Probably a critter or something.

•Multi-UO.

Well, it appears as if multi-UO still works just fine. Someone sent me it and it passed my virus/trojan checker (damn paranoia) and it did what it was supposed to do. I uploaded it and you can download it here. It has also been added to the files section.

Thanks to Lord Tristan for the file.

•Damn I am stupid

First off, I want to welcome Galahad to the team. His PvP stories are pretty cool. Check them out.

Loren hasn't gained any skill points in healing, anatomy or spell resist in a couple of weeks. Couldn't understand it. I was even considering calling a GM to see if Loren is bugged or if I was doing something wrong. Then I got a bright idea. I checked my skill points to see if I ran out of skill points to give. Well shit. I ran out of lumberjacking (had 40 in it at one point) and turned tracking down. What a dumb ass. Remember that when you have problems with skill gains. Check your arrows before calling a GM. Anyway...

Took out my macer to mess around with Skeletal/Bone Knights up at the City of the Dead. I found a Skeletal Knight that was stuck on a hill. We could hit each other but I was able to run off and heal. I gained 4 points of str (up to 95), about 20 points of parrying, 5-10 points of macing (wasn't paying attention) and some healing. Thing is, there were Bone Magi, Skeletons (2-4 at a time) and Bone Knights spawning in and chasing me away from him. WTF? I am NOT bothering you. Selfish bastards. Anyway, my macer had to use his Silver Staff to beat them off so he could go back and use his shield and mace to gain skills off the stuck knight. I had him for an hour. Pretty good. Wish it was always like that ::grins:: Now, if someone would be willing to escort me to the Wall so I can gain skill, that would be great. I would provide bandaids or regs for healing me and a recall scroll so they can get out. And they can keep the gold we find. I just want to GM this guy. Getting tired of "developing". I want to fight with him.

I tested Bubbas (Trolls), Willys (Gazors), and Reapers last night with Loren. If you got a top notch warrior with high melee skill and can heal relatively well, they are nothing but 1 minute kills. But do watch out for the explosion,paralyze, ebolt combo Willy likes to use. It can be pretty devastating. Reaper loot sucks (about 20 gold less). And Willy loot isn't as good either (about 10 gold less on average). Bubba loot is the same. And I STILL haven't found a damn treasure map off of Bubba or Willy. Greedy bastards. GIVE IT UP!

Messed around with Clyde as well, his magery, eval and meditate are going up thank you very much. He needs strength BAD (at 60). He's got room to pick up mining for it (already had 50 in herding and over 60 in macing and wrestling). I am just lazy :/.

I got an itch in my ass again and decided to have Loren go after Titans on Titan Beach. Um. Bad idea. Don't go alone. Pathfinding is a bitch. They can get at you and those that can't, another wil spawn in on you to get at you. There seem to be 2 spots that you can trap and I have the screen shots. But guess what? Yeah, dumb ass that I am I left them at home again. I got to start updating from there. Would make updating SO much easier. I promise to get them up asap. Note about trapping, when the monsters are where you want them, have a teleport ready so you can jump up. Or you can mark a rune. I recommend teleport. You might use the rune one day and wind up recalling into some nastiness. Anyway, I wound up killing Cyclops, a bunch of Joeys (imps) and about 6 Wyverns. You thought White Wyrms were fast. Try running away from these on foot. I got hit so many times. I am glad I got a horse. Even then, it was rough. Oh and they regenerate SO fast. Trying to kill one when 2 others are chasing you was alot of fun. I got irritated, but was happy for the AI change. Wyvern One: "Hey Bob, this bitch is fucking with me, want to give me a hand?" Wyvern Two: "Shit John, let me get Scott and we will wax the ho". Well, that's what it seemed like anyway. Blade Spirits took care of most of them but they just kept coming. Screw that. Recalled out. Didn't even see a Titan :(. Wyvern loot just plain sucks. 180 gold on average. :/ Cyclops was giving up 500+.

I got another itch and decided to find some bolts so I could test my +22.5 Archery Heavy XBow of Vanquishing (go ahead, DROOL! :)). 4 bolts, dead Orc Lord :/ . That was boring. Hmm...who to test it on? SNAKEYS! I found an Ophid Warrior, 6 hits, dead. Did that with 3 warriors so that's a firm count. Cool. Found an Ophid Apprentice Mage, 8 hits, dead. Found an Ophidian Matriarch ... ok ok, she found me and chased me around a bit (bitch). Got to my spot and started pecking away at her. After picking up the bolts off of her and on the ground (I was missing ALOT), it was a net usage of 16 bolts to kill her (started with 155 when I found her, had 139 when I was done). Now THAT is pretty good.

I bought a +10 Tactics Katana of Power yesterday. I was killing Orcs and Gazors pretty fast. I think I am going to have to find me some Red Mages to test it on. You know, all in the name of UO science :).

DEATHMOANS!

•Then he d-robed me...For the sixth time.

I was in Bucs with Galahad dueling like a champ. I am dueling this one guy and he is down to round 2 hps when all of a sudden someone runs up and heals him. I am like "WTF is this bullshit." And then the bastard kept on attacking me while he was getting healed. I don't know why I trust anyone.

Well eventually he killed me. I ran to the healers, got 10 aids and a war fork and a wooden shield and started pounding on the guy again. 20 seconds later he was dead. I begin to loot and then realize I am grey. Why was I grey? God knows why I was grey.

So I start running to hide and then some archer starts plucking me with his bow. I run upto him, rake his ass with the war fork, and he runs through the teleporter to the mainland. I follow and on the otherside am greeted by a paralyze by one of his friends. AHHH SHIT!! No trapped pouches. An Explosion Mind Blast later, followed by someone heavy X Bow hits...Im saying OooOOOoOoOoOOOoO. Oh I am pissed.

Run to the healer since I am blue now, get a kryss and a wooden shield and a few aids. This mage and his archering friend are spouting on "How they OWNED me." Well, I proceed to kill the mage. I loot his stuff bank it and start socializing again like usual.

The mage comes back from the healer, visits Splint CrackKnee or whatever the banker's name is, and paralyzes me. To make a long story short, when I have no trapped pouches, I am dead. So I run to the healers, get rezzed, and the bitch throws an E Bolt at me. Dead again. I run back to the healers and get rezzed again. This time he throws a explosion at me. Dead again. This continues for 5 times. I was d-robed 5 times by the same newbie. I really don't care, it's just fame. But the principle!!! My god. What happened to honor in this game? The old days will never come back when you would be in Shame and the Dreads would come flying from off screen, proceed to kill you, then rez you, and gate you to town parting with "Good fight" or something to that effect. Redrum was right that a lot of the good pvpers have left. Good both in skill and good in respect for others.

•A mix between UO, EQ and Quake.

Another MMORPG decided to join the crowd. Only this one is cool. It's called Neocron. The beta is supposed to start after summer. There's a lot of interesting things about this game...

The good:

• You can download the game for free, or buy it for 20 bucks if you want the CD.
• Instead of guilds, there's clans with factions and ranks. You can setup clan houses if you're ranked high enough.
• There will be trade skills and you can run your own shop.
• You can get away from guards, instead of dying in .1 seconds.
• There will be quests and you can create your own. However, in order to stop the damn cheaters, you won't get free items to give away in a quest. The reward is taken out of your pocket.
• Monsters will raid cities, instead of just masturbating in their cave all day.
• You can't gain stats or skills from other players (no more sparring for you).
• The stat/skill system: you gain stats and skills from doing everything. Meaning, you need to level up and gain experience in order to use skills at higher levels, but the skills do NOT go up from doing that alone. You need to use multiple sub-skills to actually raise the skills.
• Player-killing: first, player-killing is allowed. What I said about balance a few updates down is basically what they did. When you kill players, you turn "evil"; you lose experience upon death; you can't enter town; you won't get experience from killing others.
• One character per account per shard. This is ideal for a player-killing system to work. No mules or innocent characters on your account. One character and one character only.
• Magery. Woot! Also related to magery: instead of magic items, you use magery to give items special abilities. The special abilities eventually wear off.
• Party system with no limit as to how many players can be with a party at a given time.
• You can be a hacker. Not sure how this works, but I imagine you can break into buildings, etc.
• The graphics are awesome.
• There will be drugs and you can get high. Well, not really like that. Drugs are used mainly to heal and cure, but do have side-effects (dizziness, weakness, etc) that your normal drugs have.
• There will be underwater areas and you can swim/fight underwater.
• Up to 99 levels, instead of the usual 50 in most games. Should keep you busy for quite a while.
• Some monsters come out only at night, some only at day.
• There will be banks.
• There will be thieves.

The bad:

• It's futuristic, instead of during the medieval times. There's guns (weapons; duh), hoverbikes and subways (travel), factories (buildings), mutants (monsters), robots (guards), etc.
• It's in 3D; 1st person.
• Looks just like Quake.
• The communication system will be like EQ's chat box.
• Zones (EQ and AC).
• $10 monthly fee (this is a given with MMORPG's, but it's still considered bad).
• No storyline.
• Appearance and character customization is small and limited.
• Only 4 races.

Both/neither:

• No houses, but instead, apartments. This is both good and bad. Bad because you don't want 50 people living by you - especially if you're a PK. Good because at least there are places to live. If apartments are only in town, then that's also both good and bad. Bad because PK's will not be able to store anything anywhere. Good because you'd be safe. They didn't say whether or not they'll only be in towns or not though.
• Items do not wear out or decay. This is bad in the sense that you can keep an item forever, but it's good in the sense that there are no magic items.
• Only 5 skills. This may throw you off, but the good side is that these are mainly "base" skills, so-to-speak. There will be a handful of sub-skills which are the major factors.

Well, I'm looking forward to it. It sounds unique and I like that. There's a lot more stuff mentioned on their official site, so go check it out. There's also a movie that you can check out here. Much like the recent Diablo II movie, it's by Gamestar, so it's in German.

•This is just sad....

How To Get More People To Buy Our Lame Game 101: make a buddy program. For every "buddy" that you get to sign up for UO and get them to play for 90 days, you get a free month of UO. This is good in the sense that you get a free month, but it's lame because they're only doing it so they can get more money and customers.

Something smells funny and it's not me (maybe). Must be all of the new games coming out.

In other news, Momaw doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. There is no cinematic introduction for Diablo II on the Diablo II Official Site. Unless he's talking about Diablo II: The Calling; in which case is 50 month old news.

And here I thought I was making an ass out of myself when I post stuff that's 10 days old (note: nothing personal, Momaw - just a joke).

Lastly, is there a working multi-UO (or something similar) anywhere? According to 15 people, who are probably all the same person but acting like multiple people so I post this, it seems the link for Dr. TwisTer's site no longer works. Does the program work anymore, even? Feel free to let me know so I can change or delete the link on the Files section.

•It's MY turn to tell a story.

Seems the updaters like telling stories about what they did, so in order to not feel left out, it's my turn. My story is titled, "5 minutes on Battle Net". It was truly a great adventure.

Enjoy!

•Mind Blast. Need I say more?

I only got to play as my mage today. He is red and people just love to attack him. Even when he is dueling. What newbies kill two reds when they are dueling? Someone inform me because it boggles my mind. It really does.

Over the past week or so, since UO:R and its WONDERFUL changes came out I have been dueling a lot. Ill relay some of the information about mage vs. mage I have found.

I am assuming that both mages are the normal tank mage, because most of us are just too lazy too take up inscription, arms lore, blah blah. Both have 100 str, 100 int 25 dex. I, for one, use maces, but I know that most people are using swords so lets say both use swords.

First. Since the opponents stats are 100 100 25 (strength, int, dex) are imbalanced, mind blast is going to hit hard. But if you cast clumsy on them their stats are 100 100 16. Even more damage.

Second. I have found it better to only use a weapon in the beginning of the duel to get that one initial hit off, or when you have no mana. Obviously, we know that during the fight, weapons are worthless because of the removal of the insta hit. If they target you, and you run in with your halby, you got a good chance to hit them for a Concussion Blow and that is the end of the duel.

Third. Poison. If they cure, you re-poison. Throw in a mind blast between your poisons. This should interrupt their greater heals and you can poison them while they are attempting to heal from the Por Corp Wis. That is what I have been doing a lot lately. Mage throws an explosion-ebolt combo at me (Thanks newbie) I get my heal off and poison them. They cure. I Mind Blast. Their heal is interrupted. I poison. They cure. I Mind Blast. Boring, but I am doing pretty well with it.

Fourth. Never cast flame strike unless you know it’s going to kill them. That spell is a waste of mana. I can hit you just as good with a Mind Blast. Why waste all the mana?

Fifth. I know most of you will call me a newbie for saying this but I love the fast heal. In Mani. Gotta love it! Its fast, uninterruptible, and can keep you alive for a few extra seconds.

I'll post some more stuff later and about the great day I had at Bucs with my mage.

•Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck

Anyone remember the 3 Stooges? I do. I used to watch them as a kid and it would leave me rolling on the floor. People watch these and think: "my how violent.". Well, it's slapstick. It's the way slapstick works. And it was damn funny. I think people should go back and watch those shows. Hell, go rent them. While you are at it, rent The Little Rascals as well. And NO, not the movie released a few years ago. That sucked. My favorite was when the "gang" made the "All Women Haters Club" and Alfalfa was messing around with Darla behind Spanky's back. Spanky and Alfalfa had it out but things were ok in the end. OMG! Don't get me started about the time they were caddies. That always had me rolling. :) Oh, and for those of you that might find some of these shows offending with violence or some feminist type of attitude towards it (refers to the "All Women Haters Club" episode), I have 2 words for you: "get a fucking life" (ok 5 words). I wish people wouldn't be so damn fickle about shit. If you like it, like it, if you don't, don't. Quit dissecting every thing you come across. What does this have to do with UO? Nothing...and everything. It's about life and enjoying yourself. Play a game/watch TV and enjoy yourself. If you don't like it, play something else/turn off the TV and move on. That simple. Quit bitching about it ("Bring back precasting BYOTCH!"). I read about that stuff in every message board I read. Adapt and overcome, or get rid of your account and let someone else enjoy it.

Adam Ant has some of the best roleplaying stories I have ever read on his website. I go there daily to read up on his latest adventures. I truly despise PKs but I can't do anything but enjoy all his stories. He's a true gentleman and class act. Granted, I don't want to be on the end of his Deadly Poisoned Katana, but he displays an honor I have yet to see from any PK in UO I have run into. THAT, my friends is how evil should be roleplayed. And what makes it cool, his guild will attack and kill grief players and newbie/miner killers on sight. What a concept! PKs with honor.

•Poisen. Can't live with it. Can't live without it.

Yesterday, I was out with Galahad visiting my circle of hot spots. I started out at Bucs. Nothing. Recalled to Deceit. Nothing but a bunch of dragons killing Lich Lords. Visited the X roads. Finally...

I ride my horse up the path and find a good number of people from a certain guild that hangs out at the -X- Roads on Atlantic (Don't want to mention any names). There were four of them at the time. Two reds and two blues. I said, being my noto-ing self, "What the heck". I equip my trusty long spear, run up to one of the reds, and smacked him upside the head. He is like "WTF." His guild mates must of thought I was joking so I kept pounding on him. One of his friends realized that I was serious and healed the red I was beating down on. And then it started. One of his friends jumped in and swung his maul at me. I told him, "Stop that tickles." That must have pissed him off. I do a healing dance or two and finish the initial red up. I suggest that anyone who uses fencing, use that long spear against a non-parrying warrior. That thing can hit hard. After looting my first kill, dodging that warrior with the maul, and manuvering myself around the Energy Fields that mages were making to block me in, I start galloping to Yew.

I lose most of his guild mates but one of them is keeping up with me. I turn around, unequipped my spear and strap on the ole buckler and Kryss. I charge at this guy and whack him a few times with my Kryss of Force. He is drinking G Heals and healing like a champ. Then I get the msg we all love to see. "Your buckler has been destroyed by the attack" or something to that effect. Oh man, he was dead now. I switched back to the long spear and was rocking him good. I dished out some paralyzing blows (the paralyze only lasts something like 2 seconds. Thanks OSI!!!!!. Keeping nerfing all my characters - pretty pretty plz). I have to unequip to drink some T Refreshes because those maces are dropping much more stamina than before in my opinion. Finally, I get him down to probably 30 hps. I cast poison on him and proceed to pound him in the ground because he cannot heal until he is cured. Like Nieves, I agree that one of the best sounds in the game is the death moan. Gotta love it!!! I loot him and go on my merry way.

If you want a tip for Dexer vs Dexer that I learned from this experience is that poison (both the spell and poisoned weapons) is too good now. If you get far enough away from your opponent and can deal with the spell book equipping automatically its unbelievable. Whenever they are low cast poison on them. Hopefully they won't resist it and they don't have any G Cures left. If they don't they are usually dead.

More later.

•An Introduction of Sorts...

Greetings all...

I'd just like to introduce myself real quick before I have to start studying for finals. I've been playing UO for quite some time now and have been pvping for just as long.

Right now I have three pvp characters. Ill just go over them real quick. First is my main character who is the close to 7 times GM Mage. Unfortunately through a series of guild war and me just having bad real life days transfer over to in game, he is red. Hopefully (*crosses fingers*) he'll be blue anyday now. Second, is Galahad who is the typical parrying dexer, cept I added archery instead of magery. Flames welcome. Finally is my newest character who weilds that "Hi, I just killed you with one shot" war hammer and dishes out crushing blows likes its his job.

I'll post something a little later after I have my adventures for the day.

•Ok "peeps", listen up.

Before you ask a question about a character template, go to the character creation section first. I've been getting tons of e-mails asking if a character that's right on the page is good. FYI: the character creation section is up-to-date for UO:R. If something is out-dated, it will either be non-existant or there will be a big notice on top. Now then, please check the proper sections before you ask questions. It saves us both time.

I thank thee.

•We need good vs. evil. We need good vs. evil. Chant with me!

Is it just me or do none of the RPG creators comprehend the term "balance"? I just read the latest news on Diablo II.Net, and Blizzard just eliminated PK'ing totally. It was really hard before but you could manage it. Now you can't. In order to even attempt to attack someone, you have to declare hostile on someone while in town. They could just insta-log if they didn't want to fight. Now, you could declare hostile, jump in a portal and attack immediately. You can't anymore. They made it so you can't go through portals if you declare hostile. Ironically enough, one of the main guys at Blizzard said that they like the fear of someone attacking them when they don't expect it, and that PK'ing isn't gone. Spewing shit out of his ass, of course, since that's not even near true. Apparently, he doesn't understand the difference between PvP and PK.

What's particularly funny about the whole PK fiasco is that the most used excuse a company uses are: "cheaters", "free loot" and "too many people slaughter newbies". Well shit on me and call me George. It doesn't take a genius to figure ways to fix all that.

First, the cheaters. Don't release a game that's bugged to hell and back and back to hell again (UO). Speaking of UO, I recall Runesabre saying that the only reason the old days won't come back is because of the cheaters. Of course, being the morons people generally are, everyone said, "well said". Well said my ass. When he said that, there were no major cheats around anymore, so there goes that weak excuse. If you release a stable game, fix major exploits ASAP and trace and ban people for exploiting when you find out how they work, there shouldn't be any huge exploits around for a long period of time nor any exploiters. When UO first came, nothing happened to exploiters. None of the exploits were even fixed for the longest time either. Not to mention the game wasn't even near finished to begin with. Blizzard's mistake with Diablo I was to make everything client side.

Free loot seems to be the second most used excuse around. Easy to fix. Make it so you only get one thing. Either make it random or have them pick. In order to have a steady good side as well, make it so people that kill evil players get all of their stuff. That's a nice trade off. PK kills victim and ends up with a small stash. Bounty hunter kills PK and gets everything.

Killing newbies is the third excuse. In a game like UO (no levels), the newbie invulnerability for a period of time is good. In a game like Diablo II, make it so you can't kill someone, say, a couple of levels below you. There. Everyone is happy and the only ways to kill a newbie is if you're a newbie yourself.

In addition to the above, there should be some other penalties as well. UO's general system is on the right track, but not stable enough. Give PK's a different color, so people can tell you're out to kill others (make it so the FIRST kill turns them whatever color it is); make them freely attackable by all; don't let them recall/gate or walk into gates (UO) or make or walk into portals (Diablo II); temporary stat loss (when you die, you take a temporary stat loss. When you take it, you are no longer colored "evil" until you kill another person, so people can't keep on killing you and making you take stat loss over and over again. Make the temporary stat loss a reasonable amount of time (6-12 hours?) ).

What does all of this accomplish? No cheaters; no free, easy loot; no newbie killing; no hiding behind colors (blue PK's in UO) or backstabbing; no free escape (recall/gate, portals); harsh penalties for killing, but not impossible (D2) or way over the edge (UO and its stat loss system); true good vs. evil; risk and danger (don't even say monsters are hard or dangerous. It's a lame excuse so people don't have to die from other players and can become gagillionaires at ease).

Are these harsh? They're supposed to be. Being evil is supposed to be hard. It shouldn't be a walk in the park and an easy money maker, but it shouldn't be impossible either. BALANCE is what it is. Unfortunately, not one game even came close to accomplishing this. They either make it way too easy (Diablo I, UO in its early stages), way too harsh (permanent stat loss in UO's current state) or impossible (EQ, AC, Diablo II and their PvP switch bullshit).

I should be a game designer. My nick would be "balance man". So original and cool, I know.

•Ahhhhh *you notice a corpse of Ian*

Well it has been my privilege to post my thoughts on what I feel is the best game ever to be put in front of my eyes. That game being Ultima Online. I am stepping down as an updater on this site for alot of reasons. The main one being that I feel my time in UO is coming to an end. I simply don't have the time it takes to play the game and adequately keep you folks up to date on whats going on, and with my gameplay being as limited as it has been, I can't really bring you any stories of humor or interest. So, with that in mind I will give you a final thought on the game. If you have read my posts, you know that I agree with alot of the changes being made. However, the changes that have been made take away from why I personally loved this game so much. Let me explain.

The reason this game captured my imagination so much was the ultimate freedom it gave you in how you interact, grow, and play your character. You can be a villain, hero, peasant worker, grinding miner, or the ultimate fighting mage warrior. You had the freedom to play the moderating hero, killing those who chose to steal your or your friends fame, karma and money after you worked so hard for that kill. Or in turn had the chance to play the seedy character who laughed in the face of those who fought so hard to kill that monster only to come and steal there petty fame and loot. The world was wide open. For the most part you were able to act out however you saw fit at the time. Personally, I did both relative to whatever mood I was in at the time. And even though the game might be more balanced now, giving the true newbies (new players) a far better chance at enjoying and sticking with the game, I personally feel the freedom of playing the game how you want is gone. In other words, UO has turned into more of a "traditional game" as opposed to a virtual world where pretty much anything was possible. That is my personal opinion, I realize I am just one person and I'm happy the changes were made because even though I have less fun, there are 20 people out there that will enjoy it more. I can look past myself for the better of the game. I will most likely sell one of my accounts and keep the other. I still have very good friends in the game and play it more for the interaction than anything else. I am simply not a "powergamer" anymore. More than likely Rum and I will stay in touch and I may post at some point again. Every so often I might throw in a post when I feel that a good dose of reality is needed, and I will still read the more often than not moronic forum posts and give my moronic answers :) Thanks to Rum for taking the time to show me the html ropes and for running what is a very good webpage. Bye for now.

•I think it's time to make TheProQuo an updater.

Got this from him. Everything is word for word, so if there's any errors, you can't blame me for once.

After much testing on both Lake Superior and Test Center, these are the best weapons in order. All of us were GM in our weapon skills with GM parry, and an average healing skill of 80.

1) War Hammer of Vanquish. This is the new one hit weapon. I've personally been on the receiving end of 88 damage and 90 stamina loss and witnessed friends falling to one hit. To prove this, here is the math, courtesy of Malachor of RD.
Stratics tells us the war hammer does 7d5+1 damage (3-36). Throw in an extra +9 damage with a Vanquish hammer and your up to 44. Add a crushing blow (double damage) and your at maximum 88 pts. 20-25 chance you get smacked with a crushing blow. Now you add your anatomy, lets say GM (20%) more damage and you end up with *cha ching* = 105 pts. damage maximum with Vanquish War Hammer on a crushing blow.

Since there isn't another mace weapon that gets a crushing blow, we go to axes.

2) Double Ax, Large Battle ax or the Two handed ax. While this isn't as dramatic as the War hammer of Vanquish, its still potent. Testing on Test Center, a GM Double Ax did 66 damage. Stratics confirms the 1d31+4 (5-35) damage. Now if you add Vanquish (+9 damage) and your at 44 damage, same as a Vanquish War Hammer. Now to add the bonuses for lumberjacking (20%), Anatomy (20%), and Tactics (50%). When multiply 44 times 190% you get 83 damage. Amazingly good when you consider that its faster then war hammer and that you have 3 axes to choose from.

3) Bow, GM-Vanquish.
Using a GM bow first we averaged 30 damage per hit with a shot every 2.5 seconds. Using Vanquish Bows, we averaged 45 damage per shot with a shot every 2.5 seconds. The thing that kept archery from being number Two was its problems. You always miss while running, you have to carry arrows to use, and they cant be repaired. Archery, despite its faults, is the best way to PvM.

4) Halberd. When testing with duels between the typical 7xGM sword mage, these just rocked the cashba Not only did they hit big (30 damage on average) but they would cut the mages mana in half. The first one to get off a Concussion Blow always one. It was impossible to recover from. With 50 mana you can get off 2 ebolts which a person can heal back with 22 mana worth of Greater Heal.

Finally the 5th weapon. Magery.
It deserves to be higher, but it isn't. With the increased power of Reactive Armor and Protection, they can handle there own against the old dexer. But the new Mace/Archer is to much for the mage. With the easy gains in Parry, Resist, and Healing many have the skills to survive a mana dump. With the increased difficulty of gaining Eval, newer mages cast weaker spells. The only real bonus for magery is in PvM and in its overall utility.

•Why don't they just go out of business already?

I'm not normally keeping up on UO news anymore, since there's no reason to. I felt bored so I did just now. Anyway, I was checking up on Stratics, and they're delaying housing too. In typical OSI fashion, they lied of course...

We expect to have these issues resolved in the next several weeks and will release a housing placement schedule as soon as it is determined.

Ok. 7-8 months ago they promised everyone that a whole assload of stuff was going to come in 6 months. They missed the deadline. And they didn't have any of the stuff, but they shipped the CD anyway. And they didn't implement factions. Factions remind me of Necromancy actually. Not because they didn't implement it, but because it was a half-assed job that was never going to be finished. They knew it wasn't going to be finished, but they said it's coming anyway. Anyway, back to the lies. Now they say that housing isn't going to come in for "several weeks".

Man, I just don't understand. What is wrong with them? They say that all of this cool shit is coming in and only half or less of it actually makes it. Coincidentally, it happens everytime that competetion is on the rise (necromancy and alchemy when EQ arrived; factions and housing when EQ expansion arrived).

What gets me the most, though, is how OSI is still in good shape. Shit. If you fuck up that much, you should be out of your job and be working at Hardees (contrary to popular belief, Hardees is worse than McDonalds. Much, much worse.) But it's a good bet that even the "head hancho" over at OSI is a fucking retard himself, so it doesn't matter what the sub-fucking retards do. They all fuck up and everyone's happy.

Readers note: just because I don't play doesn't mean I can't complain. Thank you, come again.

•Isn't like Lum supposed to take care of this stuff?

It's good to know that the search for new GM's ended on a positive note.

•Maybe I wasn't specific enough...

... about the updating deal that is. When I said a PvP updater, I meant all things PvP. This doesn't mean you need 50 accounts to have one of each character that's fit for PvP, but at least have knowledge of a variety of classes (IE: mage, warrior, etc) - not just one. If I did it on a class-by-class basis, there would be way too many updaters, and the page would get clogged with junk. What I mean by knowledge is knowing the ropes for basically all of the characters (IE: I only played a mage, but I knew all of the strategies for the other PvP characters and updated about them). My apologies for not mentioning this earlier. Anyway, if you fit into the category of "all things PvP", let me know.

In other news, the game was awesome. It was boring because the Lakers won by 30-40 points, but it was still awesome. Both of my teams advanced to the second round. Woot!

•In a quick followup..

Vegeta was found dead at the hands of his english professor when he noticed all the misspellings and gramatical errors.

Fuck thats probably spelled wrong too..but im just to happy that I don't have to see him again..he can kiss my ass.

•I love you all.

I got this from my ISP, and am sending it to those of you who have another ISP and thereby may not have heard of this. Please share with your associates freely as this is from a national and respectable ISP that NEVER sends out stuff they haven't first checked out.

EXCERPTED "In this bulletin: * The "I Love You" Virus and how to avoid it."

As you may have read in recent news reports, a genuine virus is circulatingin E-mail messages with a subject line of "ILOVEYOU". Enclosed with that message is an attachment titled "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs", which is a script designed to replicate the virus by using the address book of Microsoft's Outlook software to send copies of the virus to your associates. This virus may also replace the content of files on your hard drive with the virus.

The best way to avoid this virus (and many others) is to not open any
attachment of which you are not absolutely certain of the contents -- even if it comes from someone you know. Unless you are an advanced user of the Microsoft Visual Basic software, you should also avoid downloading or executing any program that has a name that ends with vbs (ie,"runme.exe.vbs" or "listentome.mp3.vbs"). If you get an E-mail entitled "ILOVEYOU", delete it immediately.

We also recommend, if you use Microsoft Outlook as a mail program, that you disable the "preview pane" that previews sections of your message. In Outlook2000, simply reviewing the message may cause the virus to be activated. To disable the preview pane, select View and ensure that the "Preview Pane" and "Auto Preview" options are -not- selected.

Because this virus has been discovered very recently, not much additional information about it is known as of the mailing of this bulletin. For additional information updated regularly, or for information on what to do if you've already opened the "Love Letter" attachment, we recommend visiting the Symantec Anti-virus Research Center.

Well..Its worth a look. Always make sure you keep your scanners updated.

•Now that finals are over...

Let the summer of Carnage begin!

I haven't been around much I admit, and Im scared to admit this but College is in fact more important than UO. Hard to believe for some im sure.

Well my boy Vegeta is finally blue. It was a long time coming and months of nightly ghosting in Britain finally paid off.

Anyhow..you don't give a shit about macroing redness or my finals..on to my first experiences as Mage PvP in this new system.

I decided to just freelance it for awhile and get use to the new system.

First stop: Blood Elemental, Shame.
Im walking around, not at all interested in the monsters when a asian runs up. She started talking to me in that funky symbol shit they speak in. I just said *^^* over and over. So she decided to attack me. Well since I knew that swords were out of style on tank mages as a finisher, I decided to try it at the beginning of the fight. I ran up with a Halbard of Power and gave her a nice love tap, I then proceded to attack her when I noticed a Blood Elem target her, It was nice enough to take down her shield so I did a poison, explode, mind blast and she was speaking those mad cherrios. The funny thing to note about the asians is that they are extremly united. No matter if they are order/chaos or anything, they forget all hues of the rainbow when a American, or english speaker smokes one of them. I honestly took no more than 10 steps when 4 of her guild members flew in, and if you ever played on a Asian shard...you know what I mean about them flying. Our greatest computers are about 5 years old compared to what these fools have. A simple *Kal Ort Por* and I was back in Vesper.

Second Stop: Wind
Ive always liked wind, for anything really. Its really great for PvP moreso than anyone gives it credit for thats for certain. A dugeon in a small spot..alot of fun. Well I walk through the portal and right into a dragon..nice AI OSI. I got away with about 41 str and about 10 dex. Alot of reds populate this place on Hokuto, not to mention alot of lames that jump your EV's (how I got red last time). So I run down to the dragon spawn and run into one of my fan clubs. You know who im talking about. There are three types of people that talks to red ghosts in town. 1) Your friends. 2) Newbies looking up to you and trying to help you out..which is nice..but they are only kissing your ass. 3) The comedians that love saying *OooOoooOooo*. Well this fan club consisted of the second breed. *Wow Vegeta you are blue..thats kewl!* Reading that I was tempted to go red again. I have no patiences for kewlios, and only one in my entire UO history I befriended. They then asked if I had 100k for them to borrow for a large brick deed. Well lets see..there is 4 of them..large brick is 150k. If they have about 50k between four people..they are not what I would call a safe investment. I said *No, I have several 100k* and recalled.

Third and Final Stop: Lich Lord Room, Deciet.
All I have to say is wow..I recalled into 3 dead bodies..two of which were the lames that jumped me in Shame. I let out a laugh and started walking to their bodies..when I get the famous *Connection Lost* That smile quickly turned into a *FUCK* Lich Lord room is about the last place you want to lose connection, even moreso with this new AI. I quickly logged back in and I was safe..amazing. The lames were back and looting their bodies...I just gave them a simple *:)* and they started telling me I sucked. *U suk..Ur mom is a Yes girl.* Well, I challenged them to a fight..HERO agreed. If this is the same HERO from last summer he has only gotten worse, its probably a clone, like the half dozen Vegeta's running around on Hokuto. I attacked him..and was beating his ass good..when his friends decided they wanted to kill me..and they did. So what started out a normal duel turned into a 4vs1 Gangbang..bah nothing new.

Ok that was my first day being blue..Ill try to get a PvP update daily..It will get better as I get more use to the system. If you play on Hokuto and want to hookup to cause some damage..drop me a email..all I ask is that you speak english..and leave my poor mother out of this.

•PvP 101 instructed by Loren, or Stupid PKs prior to UO:R

I was on a Treasure Hunt one day with a Hunter I hired when I got a yell from across the room that a PK was sited outside of Delucia's East gate and was killing the newer Tailors and fighters (not an uncommon occurence in GL). I asked my partner if she would be okay. She said yes so I continued on. That's when she saw the red come on screen and she took off. I told the Hunter what was up and asked if he was going to be ok. He said yeah, and I made the 2 Recall jump back to Delucia's bank, got my Halley of Power, my +20 Scimitar of Force and kicked my horse into high gear. The dumbass had just paralyzed my partner and was starting the kIlLaCoMbO (KalVasFlam+Cor Por; how original). Anyway, I dragged his lifebar, targeted him and ran into him. Got the insta-hally-hit (yeah, that's original, too) off and took 1/2 his life with that first hit. I told my partner to go to town while I deal with this ass. He started screaming "HEY! STOP!! HEY!!!". I kept at him and I finally stopped after a few more "HEY! STOP!". He would try to circle but I kept him in "front" of me. I told him that was my partner and to leave her alone. He said: "oh, I am sorry man, I didn't know". Like he knew me or some shit. "Well, just leave her the fuck alone and we have no problems". He said, "kewl man, thanks." and left. I should've just killed him, got his loot, gave it to my partner and went back to my Treasure Hunt with both of us happy. Oh well. Needless to say, he hasn't been seen near Delucia again.

My friend had just come into town and we started talking when this d3wd starting screaming, D3wL m3 n3wbi3!!!. My friend then said he had just killed this idiot. The d()()d started spouting, "I will get my main and R()X J()()S!". My friend said, "go for it". I asked my buddy if he needed backup and he said "nah". I asked, "can I watch?" He said "sure". I went ahead and got my +20 Scimitar of Force. Just in case. We went outside the east gate and there was a mage casting multiple summon spells (elementals). I assume he was gaining magery. I kept my eye on him either way. I told my buddy to go "off me" (this means, a "friend" will double click on you while in combat mode and go grey; I am sure Redrum can explain it better). They started fighting for a couple of minutes and the mage had a summoned demon attack my friend. Oh no you fucking don't. I jumped on that mage so fast he didn't know what hit him. 2 hits later (1/2 life) and he was running for his life. Bastard. The mage took off into town and I stopped my persuit. Getting guard killed was not in my plans for that evening. My friend kept chasing the k3wl d()()d and I lost them all in the confusion. ::sighs:: Damn, no more fun tonight. A minute later, I went out to get hides for my partner's tailor. Guess who comes running up the hill to attack me? d()()d starts off with an e-bolt and I was on him faster than a bee on honey!! 2 hits and he was running like a bitch with his tail between his legs. Needless to say, he hasn't bothered me since either.

Well, that's my PvP stories for the day.

•I'm so wise.

There's a new Warcraft III interview at Daily Radar. Everything mentioned everyone already knows about, except that heroes do in fact get inventories (5 points for me). But it's not what I originally thought (a big inventory that fits weapons, armor, etc that you can equip). Instead, it's a small inventory that fits magic items. Magic items aren't what I originally thought either (weapons/armor with special abilities that you can also equip). This is what was said about magic items:

They might have items with charges, or a more powerful item, like a ring of regeneration that might give abilities to them. They might have a potion of healing that they could use on their troops or themselves, things of that nature.

Then he went on to say that there will only be like 3 or 4 slots in a heroes inventory. Bleh. It would be awesome if it was similar to an RPG. That would definately make it like no other. Oh well. Like Jinx said: "Blizzard is so beloved in computer game circles that they could put shit in a box and mark it ShitCraft and it would sell a million copies on the name alone.", so I'm going to buy it either way.

•We are hiring! We are too cheap to pay though.

Well, Nieves and I seem to be the only one's updating regularly. I post off-topic bullshit subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with UO, Nieves posts about PvM, Angry Bob is busy playing that retarded 10 SIX game and the rest are in their own little world. There are no PvP updates anymore. That's not good. To me, PvP is the most important aspect in a game, thus it should be covered. Plus, the PvP'ers won't stop complaining about there being no updates. So, if someone wants to be a PvP updater (experiences, stories, strategies, etc), let me know. You must be able to speak in proper english (I say this everytime because most people can't even accomplish that), know basic HTML (fonts, links, etc), act mature when updating, and most importantly, be a very experienced PvP'er.

•Worthless fluff

Are you kidding me? Not one email today? WTF? Am I going to have to post more than once a week to get any thoughts, rants, or suggestions from you people?=) Well, don't count on it. Lately I must admit I'm a little disenchanted with the game. I've been playing my townie and that's just sickening. I killed a friend of mine accidentally with my 3x gm townie with the following: 1 crushing blow from my hammer. 1 wiff. And 1 more crushing blow. Now my friend has a 6x gm townie. That is just wrong hehe. I'm sure that will be nerfed. I can't go around doing 70 hps of damage every other hit, or .. maybe I can. I just hope no one catches up with my 50 resist. Muhaha

Well I just read Rum's post and yeah it's the same on every shard. The one skill no one had to macro was whining. Everyone on Chesa was gm in that category from day one. It got continually worse the more people started having to work to kill people and as more and more people got better connections. Guess that's what we get for playing a 14 year old's wet dream.

•Old rant site is back.

My Ten Bucks, one of the sites I visited the most, is back. For the record, "Ech Em Yoo", I agree with that guy when he said all of the "good" PvP'ers left. When I first started playing, most people were nice, respected fights and get this - they actually weren't scared to go red. Nowadays, everyone is full of themselves. Like Ian said a couple weeks ago, they think they're better than the game itself. If they win 80 to 1 (the usual fight), they talk shit for hours. If they lose in a fair fight, they complain and complain and complain and complain for hours. I can't remember the last time someone said "good fight" after a duel. It's either "owned" or "I lagged u cheat fag". Skill wise, PvP'ers might still be around. But the majority of them are cocksuckers that honestly believe they're better than everybody else (even if they suck). Hell, when I was PK'ing, the victims didn't even cry as much as PvP'ers did. Most of them actually stayed to fight (these are guys that normally don't have 7xGM's like PvP'ers have nor do they have a lot of PvP experience, but they fought anyway), while PvP'ers always ran like bitches with their horse when they were losing. There's something wrong when non-PvP'ers that get attacked when they don't expect it are more respectful than PvP'ers that usually initiate the attack are. This is my experience on Great Lakes anyway. I can't say if this holds true for other shards.

In other news, the "sell-outs" (side note: if someone offered you millions of dollars for something you did for fun, don't even say you wouldn't take it) have a new site for Horizons. On the same note, they cut off Gnomes, Ogres and Trolls from the game. Oh well. There's still 15 races to choose from at least. As always, the second the Vault puts up a site, they do an interview with the developers. The guys at Artifact Entertainment (company name) are good at ignoring questions, like OSI. They didn't say anything, except Horizons is better than the rest. Wow. That certainly convinces me to pre-order it a year before it's released just because of that!

Lastly, for the 500 of you that complained about Pacman and his fingering anal fetish; I wasn't online to delete the messages. I'm not a machine set to moderate the board 24 hours a day. The subadmins didn't have the power to delete messages either. Now they have the power to delete, so everything should be "A-OK" from now on.

•Massive is right.

There's a new Diablo II gameplay movie over at Diablo II.net. This is the best movie I've seen. It's 85 MB's, so you might not want to download it if you have a shitty modem (like me, but I need all of the information, so I downloaded it anyway). It's also in german, so you probably won't understand what the hell they're saying.

In addition to what Diablo II.net mentioned, it shows how you raise the dead. It's easy and simple. You put your "raise the dead" image (like a macro, but it's a tiny image) on the screen, click it and target an undead corpse. If you have the right amount of skill, the monster raises and becomes yours. You'll know that they're yours because they turn a different color (in the movie, evil skeletons were dullish yellow and yours were white) Controlling your undead army is also easy. They follow you and when you attack something, they attack it also. You don't have to tell it what to do or anything (like in UO, where you have to tell it to guard, attack, follow, etc).

Quests are easy. I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't get into full detail about what they did. Anyway, to do a quest you go up to an NPC and it says what they want you to do. In the movie, the quest was: Go through the Underground Passage to the Dark Wood, search for the Tree of something, (it was blury, so I couldn't tell what it said. Sorry) and recover the scroll. They left town, went to the rogue encampment waypoint (a portal-type place that shows the list of all the places where you can go) and picked the Dark Wood. Then they killed monsters, found the tree (it's unique looking, so you can tell the difference) and the scroll was in/by it (hard to tell - it went by pretty fast). When clicked on the scroll, it said to take it to a location. They took it to the location, found a key to a place. Went to the place, did what it said to do and a secret portal opened. They went into the portal, fought the boss (it's interesting who you fight and what happened to the town he's in...), rescued someone, took that someone to town and got their reward.

For those of you that couldn't understand what I said because I didn't want to give any details, let me put it this way: when you do a quest, everything is detailed to its fullest and the locations are very, very easy to find. You will not have to go halfway around the map before you find where you want to go. It's one location after another.

Getting your loot back is also easy and doesn't require you to pick up every little item you have. Once you click on the corpse, everything that you had on last (armor, weapons, etc) automatically goes on your body. The rest automatically goes into your inventory. This means that you won't die 80000000 times before finally getting your stuff. Nice. Very nice.

Secure trading is just like UO's design. You put what you want to trade and both of you click on the box.

It also shows how gems work. According to Diablo II.net's gem page, gems are only found on bodies - you can't buy them. You can only put a gem on a non-magical item. When you put it on, that item becomes magical. The type of item depends on how many gems you can put on it (in the movie, it showed a longsword-looking item, and it could hold 3 gems). Putting the gem on an item is easy. All that you do is drag it onto whatever you want. Once you put a gem on an item, it can't be removed ever. The gem glows in your inventory and from other peoples' perspectives, so you/they know you have one. There's more, but too much to list. Go to the above link to find out more.

Item highlighting. You will know when there's an item laying in the middle of 800 corpses. When you put your cursor on an item, this is what it looks like:

Item name

It's bright and highlights, so there's no way to miss it.

Lastly, and most important, there didn't seem to be any lag or bugs. Everything seemed to be running smoothly.

All in all, it looks fun. Everything is incredibly easy to do and there are no tedious tasks. Seems to be turning out pretty good. I smell another game of the year award.

•Warcraft III, network and site stuff.

Warcraft III.net has some new interesting tidbits about the game that will r0x the rest (WC III, of course).

The entire game is a RP-style game. A strategy games' basic design is defeat missions on singleplayer and build/attack on multi-player. Aside from the heroes, there will be no missions. You have to do quests given by NPC's in order to level up, etc. But the interesting thing is that they've added magic items into the game. You get the magic items by doing quests given by NPC's.

Another interesting thing to make it even more of a RP-style game is that NPC's will drop items and gold. In addition, you will get your main source of income from getting resources (mining, etc). Think of your main source as your bank - where the gold stays there forever until you use it - like in UO. But since NPC's drop items and you get magic items, it sounds like heroes will get inventories, and the stuff they pick up stays with them forever. When they die, they lose the stuff they have. Since there's magic items, it also sounds like you will be able to equip/unequip, put on armor, etc. These are just beliefs, but it sounds about right to me.

By the information given, the only thing that actually makes it a strategy game is the concept of building armies/towns and attacking with your units. Other than that, it sounds completely like a role-playing game. But that's not bad. RPG's are the best kind of game.

The only bad thing is that they've cut the 6th race. They still don't mention what the 5th race is. It's not elves, like everyone thinks. It's a good bet that it will be a good race, because there's 3 evil (demons, undead, orcs) and 1 good (humans). Too bad they didn't get the 6th race in - it would be evenly matched. Oh well. There was 2 races in Warcraft III and 3 classes in Diablo II, and I still played them for a year or two.

It will be very interesting to see how this game turns out. Blizzard is still going to shoot for it to be released this year. Will that happen? No. But I don't care. It's better to release it later and have it kick ass; than release an unfinished, buggy piece of shit, then add more later and complete it 3 years after its release.


In other news, I'm just going to throw the network up soon. The design and graphics aren't even near complete, but oh well. I don't have enough time to work on it, since this site takes up all my damn time. I seem to be cluttering up this site with off-topic updates (like this one), so it's best to just get it up and put them there - instead of here. Then work on the l33t design in the meantime. It should be up very soon. All that I'm waiting for is a reply from the hostess.


In site news, the PvM section looks to be coming along at a fair rate. According to Nieves, the "large group", Terathans, Orcs, and Undead should be done pretty soon. The rest will probably come shortly after. Then the money section should be done a day or two after that. Most of the money is from monsters and I still have the rest (tradeskills, etc) on my hardrive. The PvP section, however, is not coming along so great. I only have the basic setup done and nobody seems to know shit. But that's cool. Given that there's 800000000 different PvP characters now, I wouldn't really expect people to know every strategy right off the bat. I will get it done as soon as I can though.

Also, what do you guys think about a weapons page? It would have a listing of what the good weapons are and what characters would benefit most from them. Let Nieves know if you're interested, since he's going to take care of it (not having to do everything alone is a definate plus, so give him a brownie on my behalf). Or just post on the forum saying you're interested. Either way will work.

•PVP Update

Ok, everyone is bitching about Nieves' updates on killing monsters, well here is one about killing people. (For the record, I like Nieves' posts, and like Nieves personally from talking on E-mail)
I PvP, I PvM, I fish, I smith, I tinker, I do as much as I can in the limited time that I have including a full time job. I like to play the whole game, not just a part of it. The lack of PvP updates is based on the fact that PvP right now has been smacked in the mouth. The UO:R patch introduced more server side lag than I have seen in over a year.

Traces are consistently better and lag consistently worse than it has been before. I play on Atlantic so the traces are improved by the new ISP, and the lag went up with UO:R. PvP is reduced to the lowest common denominator. Connection. Period. Fast con wins, every time.

Every classic mage is now useless and will need to come up with a new finisher. Archery as a finisher is not good, has the same problems as melee. Perhaps pick up anatomy and arms lore to be bruce friggin lee and disarm and stun your opponent then e-bolt him into oblivion. Hell, it might even work. The point is, there are too many new variables being introduced at once for things to all settle out quickly.

Right now I can obliderate guys that used to kick my butt, and guys I used to cream can kill me really fast. The last time I died was to 4 order guys trapping me against the bank. I don't want to talk about that. That type of PvP still works. 4 to 1 odds = victory unless all 4 of you are total newbies with 50 Str. I'm fairly sure that mages in PvP are done, period. Every decent weapon does more damage over time than e-bolts or flamestrikes cast by a GM eval/GM mage.

They need to inrease the damage on those spells, or at the very least reduce the variance in the spells for GM mages, or maybe move the range. Instead of 20-40 for everyone, maybe have ranges based on your magery (i.e. (magery/4)-(magery/2) so a 50 magery character can cast a 12-25 point e-bolt, and a GM mage can cast a 25-50 point e-bolt) This way, weapons are not so obviously superior to magic. Right now, the only real use for magery is to heal, to cure, to travel, and to summon daemons for annoying people to play with.
Taht's why I won't go to candyland. I can't kill the irritating people.

PvP is hurting, a lot of the old PvPers are gone, because they don't like the way the game is headed (like Red) or have played the game as long as I have, and are just bored by it (also like Red.) I think by people limiting themselves to just PvP or just PvM, they increase that boredom factor, but that's just my opinion. As usual, if you disagree, feel free to E-mail me. I like telling people they are wrong. (Look Red, no CR!)

•Think you're quick with your hands?

I just found this site, and I think the script is pretty neat. See if you can close any of the boxes. Don't panic when you go to the site; thinking that your computer is going to blow up. Hit any key or end task a few times to get rid of the boxes.

Thanks to myself for being bored.

•Uh oh.

If you download Metallica songs on Napster, you might want to be careful. The full story is here.

Thanks to goo for pointing this out. You see, our board isn't worthless. Well, maybe it is.

I firmly believe that Metallica can go fuck themselves. Thankfully, I downloaded all of their songs months ago. Apparently, Dr. Dre is going to do the same thing. Who cares though. Dr. Dre sucks. He only had one good song when it was just him. The other songs that he had were good because there was other people. And he complains that people "forgot about Dre" when it was just him. Well no shit Sherlock. It's because you suck alone.

•Ching! Ching!

I just heard about the UO II news, and I must say, everyone at Origin (or EA, or both) is a fucking retard. Instead of making a good game for once, they're going to rush yet another one. They're not "promising" (for the stupid, this means no) that housing, guilds, quests or mounts are going to be in the game when it releases. What's particularly funny about this is that the aspects that make UO different than the other games is housing and mounts. What makes every RPG good is quests and guilds. They're not going to have any of it? I'm a bit lost here. Isn't a sequel supposed to be better, not worse? Hell, there's more in UO than there will be in UO II. I can imagine that the only thing that you can do is fight monsters, be a tradesman and jerk-off to female characters played by ugly, fat, retarded-looking pedophiles (again, for the stupid; this is a freak who finds children attractive).

The reason that they're doing this is easy: money. They want to ship it out before the other MMORPG's do. Or at least ship it around when the others do. I'll guess that it will be shipped by the end of this year and be a half-assed game - much like their other products. But will it matter? Nah. There's too many idiots that will buy it anyway. The funny thing is that they will bitch and moan about it being lame, when they knew it was going to be lame when they bought it. Oh well. Nothing you can do about stupidity.

But hey, the good thing about this is at least there will be other choices. When UO shipped, there wasn't much else out there. It came about when Diablo started getting lame, and there was nothing else to choose from. This time, however, there will be. Diablo II will be out soon, Anarchy Online will start beta soon, a couple more shitty (maybe - they don't get the media hype, but they may be good) MMORPG's are actually in alpha/beta right now, Black & White should start beta (sounds pretty damn done to me) this year and I'm sure there's others out there. Ahhhh... it's always good to have to choose; rather than pick one you don't want.

In other news, Enemy of the State is an awesome movie. Of course, since I'm a bumb, I wait until movies are only one dollar to rent. It is good though. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. Austin Powers II is stupid. I bought it for 5 bucks (got jipped) and I hate it. Only some parts are funny and the movie as a whole is just, um, gay. Very gay. Don't watch it if you haven't already. You're better off buying a candy bar and soda than renting it. At least you'll enjoy the candy bar and soda.

•Trap Spots

For those of you that are interested, here is the trap spot for the Ophidians near the Terathan fort. Note that you have to teleport up there quick (the spot I am standing on) as soon as you bring them from the east.

You can see the pictures here and here .

I hope OSI doesn't consider this a bug or an exploit.

Enjoy.

•Scorpions, Imps, and Harpies oh my!

After a lengthy wait for ANOTHER time warp (there goes another 2.5k I made!) I logged on with my archer to run out to the desert to mark a rune for my future explorations and maybe find a Titan.

There were Scorpions everywhere. WTF? I hate those annoying things. Do nothing but walk up, poison you, and try to have you for lunch. Pests. Squash that one, move on. I ran into an Orcish Lord, pulled out the broadsword of force and started to bash his head in. This guy is tougher than I remember him to be. After a minute of bashing and 2 bandage heals, he was dead. 681 gold. Not bad. I need to find me more Orcish Lords. 200 more gold than they used to have. I saw 3-4 Stone Gargoyles and a few scorpions lurking about and decided not to push it. I moved on and found a Stone Harpy and got her on a big green hill. Well, she chased me up. Details. Anyway, I poisoned her (cool, that still works) and proceeded to peck her to death. Funny thing about this is I got the girl to confuse herself. This hill (plateau?) was big enough where I could run across screen, peck her with 2 arrows, run back across when she got too close, and peck her again. What she would do is come straight for me, I would run past, she would take 2-3 more steps, turn around, and come for me again. Was HILARIOUS. Reminded me of Scooby Doo chase scenes :). Another 681 gold. Hmmm...maybe this would be easier than Ophidians. Another Harpy showed up and I took care of her too. Awesome. Another 600 gold. I can get used to this.

I moved on, found my old hill and marked a rune. Then I found a cyclops. Good enough. I poisoned him. It worked. Great. That's when an Imp shows up. Ever have that kid in school that just annoyed the shit out of you and wouldn't leave you alone? Fucking Imp kept showering me with poisons wrecking my rhythm with the Cyclops. I targeted the Imp to get rid of it and then I got the dreaded: "Client Crash" error. Oh shit. I have never restarted UO faster than I did that time. When I got back on I was at 20 life and around 30 stamina. Not good. I walked (not ran as stamina would drop faster if I did) got hit again by the Cyclops. 6 Life. Shit. Then the Imp fireballed me. Great, I am dead. You think? I resisted it. Woah. Drank a potion, started a bandage, In Vas Mani, drank another potion. Killed off the stupid Imp and finished the cyclops. The Imp actually had some gold, 3 ginseng, and a scroll. About freaking time. Cyclops had another 600 gold. OH yeah. That's more like it!!! I wasn't going to push my luck and went back to town and logged on with my Treasure Hunter. Had some runes to mark and wanted to build up some magery with him along the way.

I ran into a Brigand spawn near the Yew Abbey. If you ever want to hear me laugh my ass out of a chair, take me to the Mage Tower. That death sound they make is just freaking hilarious!!! Anyway, I digress. I poisoned Jennifer (the brigand), e bolt, explosion, DEATHMOAN! Die bitch! Sorry, got carried away again. Then an Ettin, Harpy, Skeleton and Spectre all decided to come in messing with my fun. What a bunch of bastards. I stayed and killed off the NPCs (I had to hear the death moans :) ), and the Ettin, looted those and the chest (Treasure Hunters are good for that) and decided to leave when my reagent count was low (UOAssist). Not too mention I got tired running all over the screen trying to stay away from them.

I got back to town after marking some more runes and was chatting with friends. That's when Ol' Mr. Polymorph Asshoe shows up. Hmm..."hey guys, this is the idiot that was messing with my 'sister' the other day". "Thinks he's all big and bad." First thing he said was "loser". I was like, "loser? You're the big bad PK harrassing people and shit." "Come to Felucca, I will kill you there". I spammed his ass "COME TO FELUCCA" and told him that's all he can say. "Pussy." He said he would break my neck in real life. "OOOH! Big bad man behind the monitor. Nothing better to do than be a Pixel Bully?" He recalled away after I called him a Pixel Bully a couple more times. I hate asshoes. What a good close to a UO night! :)

I may seem childish with some of this shit, but dammit, about time these twinks got what they dished out. Keep your ass off UO if you're going to act that way. Billigerent, ignorant, nothing-better-to-do-than-irritate-other-people-because-your-life-is-shit bastards. Ok, I ranted.

I am ok, really, I am.

I think it's time for another Tae Kwon Do fix.

•Seeing how everyone just loves my off-topic posts...

There's another Warcraft III preview. You can find it here. A couple of interesting points are mentioned...

Resources and towns aren't the keys to winning. This is where the RPG-style comes into play. It's better to kill people and level up than to build 5000 cities, because heroes will be the focal point in the game. The stronger the hero, the more stuff you do. You see, in Warcraft, Starcraft and most other strategy games, there is no leveling up or gaining extra powers by killing people. You build, build, build, mine, mine, mine and you can build whatever you want. This won't happen. Your heroes have to get better and better by killing others in order to build the cool stuff. So, you have to get off your lazy ass to get what you want. You can't stay on your land for 5 hours, then attack with a million of the best units.

Air units have to land in order to attack. If you played Warcraft or Starcraft, you'd know that the air units were the most unbalancing aspect in the game. You could fly over 500000000000000000000 dragons, attack from the sky, then retreat in a heartbeat if something goes wrong. In WC III, you have to fly, land, attack, stop attacking, fly. This is so much better in my opinion. Now ground units can fight back, for a change.

There will be no large-scale water battles. I never played any water levels on Warcraft II (played Garden of War everytime), so it doesn't really bother me. It sucks for the people that do enjoy it though.

Sounds like it's turning out pretty damn good. There isn't anything that I don't like about it.

•Lunch Time Fix

Well, you know what I did at lunch time...I cornered and trapped the ophidians and looted at will. This time I noted something else after using a blade spirit to try and deal with 3 warriors and a Shaman. The Ophidians have learned how to cure poison. Great. There goes that idea. And the Shaman dispels the blade spirit even though it's not targeting him. Wtf? Who told them they could work together? Whatever. Wack wack wack, shit he healed, wack wack wack, give me my gold.

I got an itch in my ass and decided to lure a matriarch and 3 warriors up to the Terathan fort entrance. Yeap, call me a sicko. The Snakes jumped on the 2 Terathan Avengers that were there in a heart beat. The snakes never had a chance. Even when the MaStA mAtTy was healing and curing herself and her guys. Was hilarious. Then the Avengers turned on me, called in 2 more (spawned) and chased my ass out of there. Well screw you, too.

Treasure Hunting: On Sunday my partner found a tattered treasure map on the ground in Papua and gave it to my treasure hunter. JOY! I decoded it and realized it was on an island southeast of Trinsic. We got there via boat after walking as far south as we could. Fought off some Giant Serpents (gained karma even; and they had gold and a head on one!!! ewww, : laughs : I better check the next silver serpent I kill) and proceeded to dig. Well, I got a message: "it seems you're in the right place, but you are not in the right world". Well damn. Off to Felucca I go.

Tell you about it later.

Sorry about Lockpicking. My runes are for Felucca for my lockpicking spots. :/ When I get em marked, I will test it.

In other news: OSI is looking for programmers to help with Client Scripting and some such. For all of those that bitch about Client crashes and have the skills to code, here is your chance to put your money where your mouth is.

Something else I keep seeing. People calling GMs/Counselors to see when house placement will start. Hell, I was talking to a GM about healing each other in a party (if you don't know, it's not working right), and this guy walks up and asks him when housing starts. STOP already. Read this and be patient. It will come. Just like necromancy.

I got the links I needed to start updating the PvM pages on the site. I hope to have it done by Friday (yeah right). Please email me with any and all tactics and include monster name, loot, tactics you use(d), and a screen shot or two if you can. I am looking for big monsters like Ancient Wyrms and Poison Elementals. No l33t speak please and something more than: "I saw it, hit it with my sword, and it was dead".

I have been avoiding it...but tonight I go fight Titans.

•Soon, turning on your computer will grant others to access your system.

Interesting news on ZD Net. Apparently, some h4x0r found a loophole in Eudora (e-mail client, like outlook express). If you use Eudora, you might want to watch out. If you click on a link (www.whatever.com), a trojan can be placed on your computer.

It's pretty interesting how it works actually. Eudora does not warn users when opening .lnk (extension for a shortcut - IE: when you create a shortcut, it's called shortcut to whatever.lnk, but you can't actually see the .lnk) files. All that the person has to do is send you an e-mail that's like so:

<a href="file:///c:/eudora/attach/whatever.lnk">http://whatever.com</a>

... and when you click on the link, the shortcut to the trojan automatically opens; without warning. But that alone won't work, because Eudora tells you when there's an attachment. We're talking about h4x0rZ here though, so of course there's a way around that. If they put the following code around the attachments:

<x-html><!--

and

--></x-html>

... it will not show up as an attachment. So, in essence, you have absolutely no clue at all that there's a trojan attached, and you won't know that you're infected. Whoever found this out is pretty god damn smart. I wouldn't ever think of something like that.

Note: do not bitch at me for explaining it so others can exploit it. The explanation is right on the headline.

In order to protect yourself, you should do the following:

QUALCOMM recommends that users edit their Eudora.ini file and add the following line:

WarnLaunchExtensions=exe|com|bat|cmd|pif|htm|do|xl|reg|lnk|

to their "[Settings]" section. (The default is to warn for all of these extensions except the "lnk" one.) Note the trailing "|" on the end -- this is necessary in order for Eudora to warn for "lnk" files, but the extra "|" can be confusing to users who intuitively understand "|" to mean "or" -- in which case it looks like the trailing "|" should not be necessary, but it's required by the Eudora parser.

Qualcomm has said that the next version of Eudora will warn for .lnk files as well by default.

To be honest, I can't believe the creators of Eudora let that slip. I can't believe that it took so long for someone to find out how to exploit it, either. Anyway, be careful. Nobody would ever see something like that coming. Hell, you just think that you're clicking on a URL.

•Well, it's finally here.

Of course, I'm talking about the Diablo II Open Beta. It's not like I talk about anything else anyway. It's really only for testing to see if their servers are stable. You only get to play the Barbarian, but that's not so bad. At least you get to see what the gameplay is like. All you need is one character. By the time you get used to it, it will probably be shipped anyway.

If you're going to pre-order Diablo II, or anything else for the matter, I suggest Outpost. Screw EB World and all of them other places. At Outpost, shipping is free and comes overnight. Plus, Diablo II is 4 cents cheaper there, so myah. I ordered tons of shit from them and never had any problems.

I'd be a good spokesperson.